


sacrifice (and other lonely habits)

by nicole_writes



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route, Hurt/Comfort, Imprisonment, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Slight Canon Divergence, Vague Fire Emblem Magic Rules, Whump, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:01:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 31,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28084344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicole_writes/pseuds/nicole_writes
Summary: Weeks before the reunion at Garreg Mach, the Dukedom arrives in Galatea.
Relationships: Annette Fantine Dominic & Ingrid Brandl Galatea, Ashe Duran | Ashe Ubert & Ingrid Brandl Galatea, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd & Ingrid Brandl Galatea, Felix Hugo Fraldarius & Ingrid Brandl Galatea, Ingrid Brandl Galatea & Mercedes von Martritz, Ingrid Brandl Galatea & My Unit | Byleth, Ingrid Brandl Galatea/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 29
Kudos: 44





	1. I - TOWER

**Author's Note:**

> This has been An Effort. I.... this idea was supposed to be small and then I'm me and it's not sure. But, finally, FINALLY. I finished it. Editing this was a slog because of school and purely because of its length and I didn't have the heart to make one of my wonderful friends read....30 000 words for me when they're already doing me many other favours, so any mistakes are purely mine. With that said, there are some heavy themes in this piece, the first half especially.
> 
> TWs include: vague references to physical torture, magic torture, violence, PTSD so please read with caution. 
> 
> Part 2 will be up soon, but if you want updates, I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/nicolewrites37)
> 
>   
> 

**I – TOWER**

* * *

On the day that it starts, Ingrid rises almost earlier than the sun. There’s an uneasy feeling in her stomach that doesn’t let her go back to sleep, so she gets up, sitting at her desk and working at the letters she wants to send. She has only been up for half an hour by the time her father bursts into her room. Ingrid shoots to her feet, staring at her father as she takes in the wild look in his eyes and his rumpled clothes. 

“Father?”

“Ingrid,” her father says, urgency hard in his tone, “where is your pegasus?”

“In the stable, why?” Ingrid replies, frowning. 

Her father turns around her room and spots Lúin leaning against the wall nearby. He grabs the lance and hurriedly presses it into her hands. Ingrid looks between the lance and her father as her frown deepens. Count Galatea hardly ever acts this rashly. Something is wrong. Her uneasiness twists into mild nausea.

“Father, what is going on?”

He grabs her arm once she’s holding Lúin and tries to pull her towards the door of her room. Ingrid digs her heels in and her father wheels back to her, his face grim. 

“You have to get out of here. Now!”

“What are you talking about?”

“We diverted troops north to Fraldarius this week to stave off an Empire attack. It was all a ploy. The troops headed for Fraldarius are nothing compared to the troops that are marching from Fhirdiad straight for Galatea.”

Ingrid stiffens. “What?”

“Cornelia knew we would assist Lord Rodrigue so she planned this to lay siege to Galatea,” her father continues. He touches her face gently. “Ingrid, darling, you cannot let Cornelia get the Relic and you cannot let her get you. She will want you for your Crest.”

Now she actually feels ill. “I’m not just going to abandon our family and our people! Is there no way that we can stand against Cornelia?”

“Our people cannot mount the kind of resistance we would need. If I surrender, perhaps she will be lenient to them. That is our only hope now. You must flee to Fraldarius and I will do my best to keep Galatea safe,” Count Galatea explains. 

“Let me get help from Fraldarius! I’ll reroute our own troops and I’ll get Lord Rodrigue to send assistance down.”

“If only we had time for that. Cornelia will be here before the end of the day and you must be gone by then.” Count Galatea spots Ingrid’s armour in the corner of her room and gestures to it emphatically. “Please, my daughter, you must flee.”

Ingrid grips her father’s arm. “How do you know that Cornelia will be lenient at all? What if she just intends to slaughter us all?”

“The Adrestian Empire and this false Dukedom wish to create a unified land. They will not blatantly slaughter here, where we are sandwiched by Charon and Fraldarius, if they do not have to. If we surrender, they will not have to.”

Ingrid hates to admit it, but her father’s logic is more than sound. She nods to him and he quickly leaves her room. Ingrid stumbles towards her armour, stripping down and pulling it on with trembling hands. She had intended to meet up with Felix and Sylvain in just a few weeks before they would head off to the 5-year reunion at Garreg Mach for the Millennium Festival. She supposes that this will just be a way to see Felix a little sooner, but the whole situation makes her more than a little nervous. 

Her father seems so confident that Cornelia will have no reason to harm anyone in Galatea if they do not resist her invasion, but Ingrid is not so sure. She only really knows Cornelia from Felix’s letters, but he has described the woman to be intelligent and cunning. If she truly is after Galatea’s Relic and Crest-bearer, then Ingrid knows there are better ways to get it than letting her prizes flee at the first word of an impending invasion. 

When she is finished donning her armour, Ingrid leaves her room and finds her father standing there, waiting for her. He doesn’t even give her a chance to speak as he smiles at her. 

“The vision of your mother, you are,” he says gently. “Now, come on, you must make haste and leave Galatea. We have a precious few hours before she is upon us.”

“What about Galatea? What about you and Rowan and Julian and Gabriel?”

“Come back for us,” her father says fiercely. “Go to your reunion. Find His Highness. Free the Kingdom.”

Ingrid nods firmly. That is a plan she can get more behind, even if she is not completely sold on all the little machinations of the plan. She hugs him tightly and then breaks off, heading for the stables. When she arrives, two of her brothers, Julian and Gabriel, are waiting for her, next to her pegasus who has already been saddled and equipped for a flight north to Fraldarius. 

Ingrid’s steps stutter as she looks between her older brothers. “What are you doing here?”

“Sending you off,” Gabriel says, stepping towards her. He hands her a bag that she presumes to be full of whatever they can spare. 

Ingrid hugs him, conscious of the lance strapped to her back, and then she pulls back, frowning. “Can’t you join me?”

Julian shakes his head. “Ingrid, we must stay. Father plans to make it look like you ran off on your own and for that to be the case, we must stay. Besides, we will help him and help our people while you search for our King.”

Ingrid bites the inside of her cheek and nods shortly. She draws her other brother into a hug and he presses a kiss to her forehead. Ingrid steps away and takes the reins of her pegasus, leading the mount out of the stables to somewhere that she can take off and fly. 

She mounts up, securing her bags and weapons, and looks down at her brothers. Rowan isn’t here and neither is her father, but there is not enough time to be sad about that. She nods to her brothers and kicks her heels into the flanks of her pegasus, taking off into the sky. 

Ingrid flies away from Castle Galatea quickly and the cool air in her face makes her eyes sting as she bites back tears. She hates this feeling. She hates knowing that she is leaving her family and her people behind to an uncertain fate. As she flies, she curses herself for going along with this. Eventually, after a few hours, she has to take a break for both her sake for the sake of her pegasus.

She touches down near a rock outcropping close to Conand Tower, the place where Sylvain’s brother Miklan had made his last stand five years ago. Ingrid stares at the tower, scrutinizing it, and an idea starts to brew in her mind. Once her mount has had adequate rest, Ingrid flies around the outside of the tower to the top, flying in through a crack in the walls. 

She lands carefully and observes the inside of the tower. It is buckled and destroyed in much the same way that it had been all those years ago and she knows that neither Felix nor his father has reported anyone using the tower in the years since the incident. Ingrid strides across the tower towards where Miklan was felled and she stops in front of a large cluster of rocks. 

She detaches Lúin from her back and carefully buries the hilt of the lance in a group of rocks so it stands upright. She digs her bundle of letters out from her bag and pulls out an inkwell and a fresh piece of parchment. She has a plan. It’s not a well-thought-out one and it’s one that her father may hate her for, but Ingrid doesn’t see herself with much of a choice. 

She and Felix had used Conand Tower as a drop point for letters for the first year after the war broke out when even the trails between Galatea and Fraldarius were too dangerous to send information along. She hopes that when Felix hears of what is happening to Galatea, he will think to check here because this way, if her plan goes how she intends for it to go, Cornelia will not be able to get her hands on House Galatea’s Relic. 

With the Relic and the letters planted, Ingrid takes a deep breath and jumps back on her pegasus, flying back towards Galatea. 

* * *

Cornelia is standing with a battalion of mages and guards right outside of Castle Galatea and her father and brothers have met her at the front gate. Ingrid lands on the roof of the castle quickly and quietly and stays out of view of Cornelia and her troops, just behind the curve of the eastern tower. 

She can just barely pick up on the conversation from here as she hushes her mount and crouches low against the roof of the building.

“It’s funny, Count Galatea,” Cornelia says, her voice dripping with venom. “I never pictured you for the type to be a coward and a liar.”

Ingrid sees her father stiffen at the taunt, but he doesn’t spit back at her immediately, giving her a calm reply instead: “What do you mean?”

“Your daughter,” Cornelia says immediately. “The one with the Crest and your House’s Relic that only she can wield safely. It seems awfully irresponsible for you to just let her conveniently disappear.”

“My daughter left for Fraldarius two days ago,” Ingrid’s father lies stiffly. “I don’t appreciate your insinuation.”

Cornelia hums. “Funny. I have no reports from my troops or my spies both in your own home and in Fraldarius of your daughter leaving until early this morning which is conveniently when you would have discovered that we were on our way to Galatea.”

Count Galatea does not react, but Ingrid sees Rowan and Gabriel both look around suspiciously at the mention of Cornelia’s spy network. Ingrid presses her hand to her mouth and breathes shallowly as she watches the scene with wide eyes, worried for her father and brothers. 

“Cornelia, you said that if we surrendered, you would spare our people,” Ingrid’s father says. 

She scoffs. “That was the deal at the beginning of this endeavour, not five years into it.” She tilts her head, smirking at Count Galatea before letting her gaze drift to Ingrid’s brothers where they stand behind her father. “Your sons are young and strong. Good stock for fighters, but it’s such a shame that they don’t bear Crests, isn’t it? It makes them rather worthless to me.”

Count Galatea finally bristles at that, holding an arm out in front of his sons. “No. We surrendered peacefully.”

Cornelia laughs. “Yes, and I’m rather done with your lies about your daughter. She’s the Crested one which, to me, makes her the only Galatea worth keeping alive. Plus, she took the Relic with her which is really just another strike against you, isn’t it?”

She lifts her hand, her fingers crackling with black magic and Ingrid’s heart leaps in her chest and she is stepping out from the tower’s cover before she can think through her decision.

“Stop!”

Her father and brothers spot her immediately and the look of horror on their faces is enough to almost make Ingrid sick, but she squares her shoulders and takes another step out of the shadow as more of Cornelia’s allies look up at her, pinpointing her location. 

Cornelia looks up slowly, as if she had expected it, and she smiles cruelly at Ingrid. “Oh, Miss Galatea, how nice of you to join the party. And here I thought you had gone to Fraldarius.”

Ingrid squares her jaw. “Let my family go, Cornelia.”

“And why would I do that?”

“Because they’re worthless to you. You said so yourself.”

“Hm, I don’t think so.”

“If you let them go, I’ll stay,” Ingrid bargains and anger grips her father’s expression as he realizes what she is doing. 

Cornelia seems more interested in her proposal. “Oh, really? So all I have to do is let your father and your brothers go?”

“No,” Ingrid says. “You will leave the people of Galatea alone.”

Cornelia rolls her eyes. “Surely you’re not naive enough to believe that a single Crest makes you worth trading for one of the old Kingdom’s strongholds?”

“I’m not,” Ingrid agrees. She takes a deep breath, calling on every diplomatic lesson she has ever received from tutors, Dimitri, and Sylvain. “I’m not saying you have to leave Galatea. I’m just telling you not to raise the taxes or collect more than they can give. Life here is hard enough for them. You have more than enough from the western lords. You will let my family go and you will not touch the people of Galatea and I will stay. You will have me and you’ll hold the location.”

Cornelia considers her offer and she looks Ingrid up and down. “Where’s your Relic?”

“Not part of the deal,” Ingrid says firmly.

Cornelia taps a finger against her manicured lips. She turns to one of the guards next to her. “Fetch four horses for the Count and his sons. They will be allowed to ride north to Fraldarius or West to Charon freely.” She looks up at Ingrid. “Come down here and prove to me that you’re serious.”

Ingrid’s stomach turns at the position she has just put herself in. She had almost hoped that Cornelia would refuse the offer so that Ingrid would have had a valid excuse to fight her, but she is not so lucky. She calls her pegasus to her side and mounts up, flying down to the courtyard where she lands a few metres away from everyone else. 

Ingrid shoos her mount away and it flies off, heading north. Ingrid clenches her fists at her sides and stares at Cornelia. “There.”

Cornelia gives her a smug smirk. “Come here, girl.”

Ingrid’s stomach turns violently and she forces her legs to move as she approaches Cornelia. Her father has an expression of anguish on his face and Ingrid doesn’t look at him or her brothers. She stops when she is just a step away from Cornelia. 

Cornelia’s smirk widens as she assesses Ingrid, lifting a hand to toy with a piece of her long hair. Ingrid’s knees lock as she forces her legs not to tremble. This close, Cornelia is almost pretty, but there’s a darkness looming around her that makes Ingrid want to shiver. Cornelia’s hand grips Ingrid’s hair and she yanks, spinning Ingrid around. 

Ingrid cries out, struggling, but Cornelia’s other hand just lifts up, glowing with a blackish-purple Mire as she holds Ingrid to face her family.

“You should leave, Count Galatea, before I change my mind and decide to go back on your daughter’s oh-so-noble sacrifice,” Cornelia drawls, sounding uninterested. 

“Ingrid,” her father says, sounding pained. “What have you done?”

Ingrid forces a smile, despite the brutal grip on her hair and the threatening hum of Cornelia’s magic. “Tell Felix he’ll know where it is.”

“Ingrid,” Gabriel says. 

She closes her eyes. “Please, go.”

When she opens her eyes again, her brothers and her father are mounting up on horses supplied to them by Cornelia’s soldiers. Julian looks at her and scowls fiercely. 

“We’ll be back for you, Ingrid.”

The edges of her lips curl into a smile at her brother’s loyalty, but Cornelia’s grip on her hair tightens and she winces again at the pain in her scalp. “I love you,” Ingrid settles on. 

They ride off, against their will, and Cornelia shoves Ingrid away, releasing her. Ingrid stumbles and almost trips to the ground. She turns to face the usurping witch and eyes the dark Mire drifting through Cornelia’s fingertips almost lazily. 

Cornelia smiles unpleasantly and snaps her fingers, dismissing the Mire, and signals for two guards to step forward, grabbing Ingrid by each of her arms. Ingrid struggles, almost instinctively, and Cornelia steps closer to her, her eyes narrowed. 

“Now then,” she says, her tone sickly sweet, “why don’t you be a good noble and tell us where your Relic is?”

Ingrid laughs incredulously. “You’ll never find it before Felix does,” she says. 

Cornelia’s expression twists and her hand raises faster than Ingrid can blink and then she’s flinching as Cornelia backhands her across the face. Ingrid’s head snaps to the right and then she works her jaw as she straightens, looking back at Cornelia. Her cheek is burning. Cornelia looks annoyed.

“I hope you don’t intend to be entirely uncooperative, Miss Galatea.”

Ingrid stares her down. “There was nothing in the terms of our agreement about cooperation.”

Cornelia lifts her hand again and Ingrid braces herself for another slap, but instead, Cornelia traces an unfamiliar rune in the air between them and it coalesces into a blackish-purple ring that hovers over Cornelia’s hand. Ingrid watches as the mage’s hand turns over and she flicks it down, the ring drifting slowly towards the ground. 

The magic is cold and hot at the same time as it presses into her leg and Ingrid gasps, struggling against the soldiers gripping her. Her struggle proves futile as the ring links around her ankle and stays there, floating and occasionally sending a tingle up her leg. Ingrid looks back up at Cornelia, frowning.

“What is this?” Ingrid demands. 

“We’ll call it a shackle,” Cornelia answers simply. “It ensures to me that you won’t be running off to do anything stupid.”

Cornelia turns and stalks off towards the front of Galatea Castle. “Bring her this way.” 

Ingrid struggles the whole way up the stairs and into the castle as she’s dragged towards her father’s study. She doesn’t question why Cornelia seems to know the layout of her home so well, figuring that it has to do with the fact that apparently, she has had spies here. Besides, she did come prepared to siege Galatea by force. 

When they push her into her father’s study, Cornelia leans against her father’s desk and Ingrid is shoved into the middle of the room. The guards release her and move back to stand at the entrance to the room. Ingrid shakes her shoulders out and turns to face Cornelia who fixes her with a hard, scrutinizing look. 

“Remove your armour,” Cornelia orders. 

Ingrid hesitates for a half-second and Cornelia flicks her wrist. The cool band of magic around her ankle sears into her skin and Ingrid’s leg gives out underneath her, going completely numb. She tumbles to the ground, crying out, and Cornelia scoffs above her. 

“Do as you are told.”

Ingrid shakily pushes herself up and starts by removing her gauntlets. They drop to the ground with heavy thuds and she slowly unbuckles her greaves and lets them fall too. She considers going for the knife hidden in her boot, but the floating magic shackle on her leg tells her that would likely be a very, very poor idea. She stays crouched down as she unhooks her collar and strips off her breastplate as well. 

When all of the metal plating from her armour is removed, Ingrid rises slowly back to her feet. Cornelia’s eyes track over her again and she points silently to Ingrid’s gloves. Ingrid yanks her gloves off and then, without waiting to be told, unlaces the backs of her tall riding boots and kicks them off too. There’s a silent glint of approval in Cornelia’s eyes that makes her feel ill and Ingrid takes a half-step back, letting her armour mark a dividing line between them. 

“The tunic goes too,” Cornelia says, gesturing to her upper body. 

Ingrid scowls. Cornelia’s fist clenches as the magic shackle tightens just enough that Ingrid can feel the alternating scorching heat and bruising cold on it before she complies, unfastening the buttons on the tunic and shedding it, leaving her in a thin top and her riding pants as she stands on the floor of her father’s study. 

“Good,” Cornelia says dismissively. “You’re not entirely stupid then.”

Ingrid presses her lips together and holds her breath to calm her racing heart. Stripped of her physical armour, it feels like someone has peeled back a layer of her being to expose something she’s been trying to hide. It’s like the bravery that caused her to step in to save her family is leaving her and she suddenly feels like a girl who is young and alone standing before an enemy. 

Cornelia lifts her hand and dark magic explodes around Ingrid, tendrils of it grabbing at her arms, legs, and chest, pulling her down until she’s on her knees. The magic burns against her skin and Ingrid gasps for air as her eyes fill with tears as she bites the inside of her cheek to prevent herself from crying out. Her head is jerked back until she’s looking up as Cornelia approaches her, gasping for breath. 

“Foolish girl,” Cornelia sneers. “Your Crest gives you value, but your connections are more valuable to me.”

She reaches out, her hand passing harmlessly through the blistering dark magic as she grabs for Ingrid’s hair. There’s a dull slicing noise and Ingrid shudders as a weight is lifted off her head. Cornelia’s hand draws back and Ingrid stares in horror at the fistful of long blonde hair that the mage is holding. 

Cornelia steps back, but the dark magic doesn’t recede. It crawls over Ingrid’s skin, burning and freezing, and Ingrid bites her tongue hard enough that she tastes blood. Cornelia hums, amused, and looks at the clump of Ingrid’s hair that she’s holding. 

She turns her back on Ingrid. “I wonder,” she muses, “what will the son of Duke Fraldarius do if this beats your father to his hold.” Cornelia holds the hair up tauntingly, letting it catch the light in the study. “I wonder what Margrave Gautier’s boy will do when he finds out that Galatea has submitted to the Dukedom.”

Ingrid’s skin prickles at the mention of Felix and Sylvain. She had known that Cornelia might attempt to use her friends against her, but she hadn’t quite realized that she might, in turn, be used against her friends. She honestly can’t decide which of the two would be more furious. They would both know immediately what a lock of long blonde hair in an envelope meant and Ingrid pities the poor messenger who might have to deliver those letters. 

“What are you doing?” she demands. 

Cornelia lifts an envelope off the desk and noticeably drops a few locks of hair into it. She does the same with a second envelope and then turns back to Ingrid, a wicked smirk on her face. “Isn’t it obvious?” The magic tightens around Ingrid and she can’t hold back her cry of pain. “I’m making a _statement_.” Cornelia steps back to Ingrid so she is looming over her. “Since you won’t tell me where your Relic is, I’m guessing the location of _Dimitri_ is out of the question, isn’t it?”

Ingrid struggles against the magic curling around her body and sneers at Cornelia. “Rot in hell,” she spits. 

The magic tightens around her until the pain burns through her. She topples sideways to the ground, gasping. The pain intensifies and her vision darkens abruptly. 

* * *

When Ingrid comes to, she’s lying on a stone floor in her thin shirt and riding pants. Her whole body aches and the uncomfortable hot and cold band around her ankle is present. Ingrid scrambles up, pushing herself into a sitting position. She has very obviously been dumped on the ground by someone, even though there is a small, nondescript cot to her right. 

Ingrid winces, rubbing at her head as she stands and looks around the room. It’s a circular, stone room and it only takes her a moment to recognize it. This is the abandoned east tower in Castle Galatea. It is a room her mother had intended to turn into some kind of parlour, but the endeavour had been lost when she had died to disease when Ingrid had been small. Ingrid has only been up here a handful of times in her life. 

The walls are plain and cool to the touch and Ingrid runs her hand along them as she paces the perimeter of the room. She comes to the realization quickly enough that the only restriction on her is the magic shackle that still twists around her ankle, a constant reminder of her situation. 

Ingrid’s feet are freezing, but she knows that it isn’t going to do her any good to dwell on the situation because there is no way that Cornelia or anyone of the Imperials that resulted in her imprisonment is going to give a damn about her comfort level. She curls her hands into fists to keep the blood flowing to her fingers as she finishes her circle of the room, stopping at the large, half-crumbled, broken window on the southern side of the tower. 

She wonders if her pegasus would still come if she whistles. It’s a grim thought to consider what happens if he doesn’t and Ingrid knows that it’s a thought she can’t contain. She doesn’t even know how long it's been since her father’s surrender and when Cornelia knocked her out with the dark magic in her father’s study. 

Ingrid places her hands on the bottom of the windowsill and leans forward. The moment her fingers wrap over the edge of the sill to the outside of the tower, the magic on her ankle flares and starts to burn. She quickly jerks back, drawing her hands back inside the tower. The flare fades back to the subtle pulsing sensation and Ingrid swears under her breath.

She is well and truly trapped and she can only hope that they don’t let her starve to death. Of course, if starvation is their plan to try to get her to talk, they’re probably going to be out of luck since Ingrid has more than enough practice of not eating her fill because of her childhood and the five years of war where Galatea has struggled to produce even the meagerest supplies. In fact, their geographical positioning to the south of Fraldarius and the east of Charon is probably the only reason that Cornelia and her Imperial sympathizers hadn’t attempted a coup of the county earlier. 

Ingrid paces around the room for a little while longer before she resigns herself to sitting on the cot, tucking her cold toes underneath her as she wraps the thin blanket over her shoulders. Considering they’re in the depth of winter now and the tower has a very clearly open window, Ingrid wonders if she might freeze to death once the sun drops below the horizon. 

The first day passes agonizingly slowly. The door on the far side of the room stays locked and shut and the window continues to burn her if she tries to reach through it. She tries to sleep, but the ache in her bones and the anxious knot in her stomach refuses to let her do so. She watches the glint of the sun in the sky that she can see as it crosses the sky and dips towards the horizon. 

Once the darkness is starting to settle over the tower, two things happen at once: the door swings open and there’s a low flash of red around the room. Ingrid stiffens up, but she is too slow to even move from the cot as a tray of food is unceremoniously dumped through the door before it swings shut. On the walls around her, a faint row of red runes glow and the temperature of the chamber jumps a few degrees. Heating runes. 

Ingrid blinks. She has heat. She has food. So they’re not trying to starve her and they’re not trying to freeze her. She’s not sure if that’s reassuring or more terrifying. Ingrid pulls the tray up onto the bed beside herself and eats slowly, picking through the bland, cold food. She makes it last like she was taught as a child: tricking her body into thinking that she is eating more than she actually is. 

She feels ridiculous. She’s locked in the tower of her own home like some kind of damsel in distress. Ordinarily, Ingrid despises these kinds of stories. They always end with the damsel being rescued by some handsome knight and never having any agency. She curls her knees to her chest and wraps her arms around them.

Tears prick in her eyes as she wonders what might have happened if she hadn’t surrendered herself. It had been fairly clear to her that Cornelia had not intended to keep any of the Galatea’s alive, except for her because of her Crest, and she would have undoubtedly arrived in Fraldarius by this point.

Maybe she would be with Felix and his father, plotting an assault to reclaim Galatea from the Dukedom. Maybe Sylvain would be there too, joking and draping a warm arm over her shoulder and offering surprisingly sound tactical advice. In an ideal world, they would be following a lead on Dimitri too, because while it's enough that they can presume he’s alive now, none of them have seen him since his supposed execution in Fhirdiad. 

Instead, she is alone and cold and locked in a tower like a helpless little girl. Her head feels lighter with the absence of her hair and the messy cut of it makes her feel angry. She is absolutely terrified at the thought of Sylvain and Felix getting nothing but a piece of her hair in the mail. She can only hope that her father beats the letter to Fraldarius and that somehow they get a message from Fraldarius to Gautier before the letter reaches Sylvain. She’s afraid of what her friends might do if they don’t have an explanation first. 

With the faint pulsing of the heat-protection runes around the room, Ingrid does manage to find a fitful sleep for the night. 

* * *

Ingrid counts five days of pacing the room at the top of the tower and pushing the limitations of her out-the-window reach before the door opens for something other than a small daily meal. Cornelia strides into the room and Ingrid jolts, turning so her back is to the wall.

She feels stupid and small then, barefoot across the tower from the mage. Cornelia’s head tilts curiously and a smile curls up on her lips at the sight of Ingrid nearly cowering against the wall. 

“You’d be happy to know that my package didn’t beat your father to Fraldarius,” Cornelia says dryly. 

The tenseness in Ingrid’s shoulders fades a bit. That’s a good thing. It doesn’t say anything about whether or not it made it to Gautier or not, but the fact, at least, that her father has made it to Fraldarius is good. It means that Felix has probably retrieved Lúin by now, along with the letters she had stashed at Conand Tower for him. 

“Apparently not even the mighty Duke of Fraldarius can get a muzzle on his son when he’s feeling obnoxious and angry,” Cornelia continues and Ingrid stiffens again. 

“What did he do?” she asks quietly. Her own voice sounds a bit strange to her own ears, having not heard it for several days. 

“Rode all the way to the border with a group of soldiers and demanded, if you can believe this, that we release you,” Cornelia replies, sounding amused. 

Ingrid swallows. It’s exactly the kind of impulsive action she had expected from Felix, so she can only hope that he hadn’t actually started a fight at the edge of Galatea territory. By the amused, but not entertained look on Cornelia’s face, she reasons that he hadn’t gone quite that far which is relieving to her. 

“What else do you want?” Ingrid says, trying to keep her voice steady as she crosses her arms in front of her chest.

Cornelia’s head tilts as a sickening smile spreads on her face. “I suppose I have something for you if you’d like to trade me something in return.” She pulls a thick, heavy envelope out of the inside of her robe that Ingrid doesn’t even need to see the writing on it to recognize the fine, thick paper used by Sylvain.

Her heart skips a beat and she wants nothing more than to have Sylvain’s letter, but she cannot give anything to Cornelia here. It’s not worth it. She keeps her expression neutral and tightens her arms, not budging an inch. 

Cornelia scoffs. “Really? Five days of solitude hasn’t worn you down in the slightest?” She shakes her head. “Alright, girl, I’ll admit, your tenacity is more than I was expecting.”

The envelope in her hand bursts into flames and Ingrid can’t help the small noise of protest that slips from her throat as the paper catches and burns and drifts to the floor of the stone tower in ashes. 

Cornelia clicks her tongue. “What a shame, isn’t it? I’m sure he had some lovely code words hidden in there for you.”

Cornelia leaves then and the door shuts with a resounding thud. Ingrid stumbles across the room to the ruined letter and cards her hands through the ashes, looking for anything even remotely salvageable. The only thing she finds is a small corner where she can just pick out the last few letters of Sylvain’s signature, confirming her suspicion that the letter had been from him in the first place. 

An overwhelming sense of dread and loneliness washes over her as she turns the tiny burnt scrap over between her fingers. She cries over the letter and she rubs her wrists against her cheeks until her skin burns from the friction as she muffles her silent cries. 

The hurt is less physical now, as she’s mostly stopped doing things that have caused her dark magic shackle to burn her, but she’s still suffering from a bone-deep chill that even the heating runes on the wall can’t banish and the loneliness that grips her when she’s awake. She has taken to dreaming of her friends’ faces and the grief and disappointment on her father’s face when she had taken his place. 

She thumbs the tiny scrap of paper until it too crumbles to dust and she falls asleep with tears on her face. 

* * *

Three nights later, Ingrid is cold and only half-asleep when she hears Sylvain’s voice. She frowns, twisting on the cot, and pushes her hands over her ears. Sometimes if she blocks them out, the dreams leave her be. It feels too early in the night to dream though, especially to dream of the warmth in Sylvain’s voice, and she squeezes her eyes shut, hoping that the dream will pass without manifesting. 

When there is nothing but blackness and silence for a moment, she loosens her hands on her ears just in time to hear a short, familiar hiss of: 

“ _Ingrid_ _!”_

Her eyes snap open. She sits bolt upright on the cot. She’s not dreaming. _She can’t be dreaming_. She turns hastily towards the window in the chamber just in time to see a flicker of red ducking down below the line of the window. Ingrid scrambles out of the blanket on the cot and hurries to the window, planting her hands on the inside of the frame as her knees tremble in desperate and gripping hope. 

“Sylvain?” she gasps out. 

“Are you alone? Is anyone watching?” His voice comes from just under the window, soft and urgent. His fingers are wedged into the top of the windowsill and Ingrid feels like she is floating. 

_He is here_. 

“Yes, I’m alone. There’s no one watching,” she assures quickly. 

“Good,” Sylvain says shortly and then he hauls himself up, vaulting through the window to land on the floor right in front of her.

Ingrid backs up reflexively as she stares at him. He’s standing there, shadowed by moonlight, staring at her with an expression that is half-fear and half-relief. He is wearing the underlayers of his expensive Gautier-branded armour, but his plates are nowhere to be seen, likely for the sake of stealth. Ingrid hurls herself into his arms and hugs him tightly, her eyes welling up with tears. 

“What are you doing here?” she asks into his chest, clinging to him desperately. 

Sylvain’s arms are so warm that they almost burn when he hugs her back, one hand coming up to cup the base of her skull, as his fingers probe at the top of her neck gently. “Ingrid,” he breathes like he can’t quite believe she is here and she is one push away from bursting into tears. 

He gathers himself then and he leans back out of the hug, his features twisted into a hard frown. “You’re freezing!” he exclaims quietly. 

Sylvain immediately sheds his outer layer, wriggling out of the outer tunic and practically shoving her into it. It feels like fire as the fur and heavy fabric settles over her thin clothing. Ingrid feels like crying again and she wipes her eyes furiously to prevent herself from crying as she stares at Sylvain. 

“What are you doing here?” she demands. 

His hands stop adjusting his tunic over her as he lets them rest on either side of her waist with an intimacy that is almost alarming. His gaze softens.

“I’m getting you out of here,” he says firmly. “Come on. We should go. There’s a Fraldarius spy who has the watch with a viewpoint of the tower, so we just have to get out the window and we’ll be home free.”

Ingrid’s heart sinks in her chest. “Sylvain.”

“I came here on a wyvern, so don’t worry about having to fly by yourself.”

“Sylvain.”

“We’ll fly a couple of hours north where we’ll meet up with Felix and more troops. It’ll be easy.”

“Sylvain,” she repeats, raising her voice just the tiniest bit, taking the risk and hoping that no one is actively listening into her room. 

He finally stops, frowning, and looks down at her. Ingrid shifts, sweeping the hem of his tunic and her slip to the side so that he can see the pulsing circle of dark magic around her ankle. He stares at it blankly, like he doesn’t understand, so Ingrid gently pushes him aside, stepping closer to the window.

She rests her hand on the windowsill and slides it out until the magic brightens and starts to burn into her skin. She holds her hand out the window for another half-second before Sylvain’s warm hands close around it and jerk it back inside. He looks devastated.

“Ingrid,” he murmurs. 

She shakes her head. “You have to go, Sylvain. You can’t get caught here. That will just play right into Cornelia’s hands.”

He loops his arms around her and hugs her tightly again, carding one hand through her short, choppy locks. “I don’t want to leave you here,” he breathes. He leans back a hair, staring down at her with burning eyes. “Did you get my letter? Because we’re doing it.”

Ingrid bites the inside of her cheek. “She burned the letter in front of me because I wouldn’t tell her where Dimitri is headed.”

Sylvain’s expression drops further. His gaze flickers dark, flashing to the door behind her. “Of course she did.” His eyes dart back to hers. “We found him,” he says next and Ingrid’s heart skips a beat, hope welling up in her chest. 

“You did?”

Sylvain nods. “He’s headed to Garreg Mach, Ingrid. Right on time for the reunion and everything!” His excitement slips again at the mention of the reunion that she is supposed to attend with them. 

“You have to go, Sylvain,” she urges. “I’ll be fine.”

His hand balls up the fabric of his tunic as he frowns and looks around the tower that she had been trapped in for over a week. “Goddess, Ingrid, I can’t just leave you here alone!”

She tentatively lifts her hand up to touch his face. “I’m not asking you to. I’m telling you to. Please, Sylvain, go to the reunion.” She takes a deep breath. “There’s nothing that Cornelia can do to me that I can’t handle for a little longer.”

“I’ll come back,” he swears. He looks down at the magic circling her foot. “We have to figure out what that is anyway, to get it off.”

Ingrid laughs faintly, but then she slides her hands to his chest and pushes him back, creating more space between them and moving him towards the window. “You need to go,” she repeats.

She starts stripping out of his tunic and Sylvain’s hands land on her shoulders. “Can’t you keep it? Goddess, Ing, you must be freezing.”

She pulls it off completely and hands it over to him. “If we don’t want Cornelia or someone else to find out about the spy, then there can’t be a trace of you here.”

Sylvain looks so disappointed that Ingrid almost smiles. He is still the same boy inside that she knows: protective, and loving, and a bit of a mess, but she needs him to leave. She pushes him back again and he bumps into the windowsill. Sylvain sighs and shrugs his tunic back on. He crouches down, swinging one leg out the window and Ingrid steps closer to him.

He pauses there, looking back at her and for a moment Ingrid feels like he might do something else entirely, but then he drops his eyes away. 

“I’m sorry,” he says. 

She wraps her arms around herself, feeling the chill from the tower now that Sylvain’s heat is gone. “It’s okay,” she assures, but she’s not sure who is less convinced: Sylvain or herself. She steps back from the window and Sylvain ducks out, swinging down and then dropping away entirely.

Her breath catches, but then there’s a speeding dark flash as a wyvern shoots up past her window, flying up and away into the cloud cover, allowing her old friend a speedy getaway. Ingrid stumbles back to the cot and sits down, flattening her palms on her legs and trying not to shiver. She swallows the urge to start crying again and silently sends a prayer to the Goddess to wish Sylvain a safe flight back to his allies. 

When sleep finally claims her for the night, she dreams of Sylvain again. 

* * *

Ingrid is alone in the tower for two days before Cornelia comes back to see her. She is startled awake by the door banging open and she barely manages to sit up before the dark mage is sweeping into the chamber, one hand on her hip as she stares down Ingrid. 

“Who is at Garreg Mach?” Cornelia demands. 

Ingrid is still half-asleep and she doesn’t come up with an answer right away and Cornelia stalks towards her. Cornelia’s hand extends and dark magic streaks from her fingers, wrapping around Ingrid’s throat and Ingrid chokes as the magic burns and closes off her airway. She gasps, clawing at the magic with her hands, but it doesn’t loosen. 

“Don’t make me ask you again,” Cornelia snarls.

“The Blue Lions!” Ingrid cries out hoarsely. The magic recedes and she slumps on the cot, gasping for air as she rubs her throat. 

“The Blue Lions?” Cornelia repeats, frowning. “What business do they have at the Monastery?”

Ingrid eyes the dark magic curling around Cornelia’s hands warily. “It would have been the Millennium Festival,” she answers quietly. “We made a promise five years ago.”

Cornelia’s frown deepens. “Of course it’s some childish sentiment like that.” She takes a step back and turns like she is going to walk out of the room, but then she stops. She looks back at Ingrid. “I wonder what your friends think of your absence.”

Ingrid scowls, but she holds her tongue from biting back a scathing retort. Cornelia’s anger seems mostly related to the gathering of people at Garreg Mach, so for the time being, Ingrid feels safe in thinking that Cornelia does not know that Sylvain has been to visit her. 

“I hope,” Cornelia says, one hand on the doorknob, “that for the sake of your friends, they are not planning on doing anything stupid at the Monastery. I would hate for there to be any reason to redirect nearby Imperial troops to reclaim the place.”

The threat in her voice is clear to Ingrid, but it also doesn’t scare her as much as she expects it to. Maybe, if she hadn’t have seen Sylvain just days prior, Ingrid might have been more afraid. Instead, she knows that Dimitri has been moving towards the Monastery and if they have any hope of finding and reconnecting with Dimitri, it will be at the reunion.

Cornelia leaves then, and the door shuts with a heavy clang. Ingrid wraps the blanket over her shoulder and wanders to the open window of the tower, peering out. A few light snowflakes drift through the air, but they dissolve before they cross the windowsill into the tower. 

“Twenty-fifth of Ethereal Moon,” Ingrid murmurs to herself. Her heart aches to have gone to the reunion herself, but she supposes that knowing it had happened without too much Imperial interference will have to suffice. 

She sits on the ground in front of the window and tucks her knees up to her chest, resting her chin atop them and closing her eyes as she sends a silent prayer to the goddess for the safety of her friends. She rubs one hand slowly across her throat where the magic had burned her and looks down at the swirling magic around her ankle. 

“Whatever it takes,” she affirms quietly. “I can take it.”

* * *

Ingrid has no visitors for a week. She counts the days by sunrise and watches snow drift by her window, but it mostly doesn’t stick. The loneliness that has been gnawing at her stomach makes her feel almost dizzy sometimes because of how encompassing it can be. It seems like every night of that week she dreams of Sylvain or one of the other Blue Lions, mostly back from their time at the Officer’s Academy. 

Cornelia doesn’t visit her to make any more thinly veiled threats so Ingrid’s only human interaction is with the guard or servant who delivers her tray of food in the late afternoon. They hardly ever open the door enough for her to see a face and when she retreats to her cot at the end of the day, it feels a bit more like she is going to crawl out of her skin. 

On the last day of the week, her meal is accompanied by a pair of light linen pants and a thin blouse. Ingrid changes immediately, casting aside her other clothes as if they had burned her. The clothes aren’t really any warmer, but they are clean and that is more than enough. 

The dirty clothes are gone when she wakes up the next day and Ingrid doesn’t linger on that fact, choosing instead to watch the heavier snowflakes cluster and start to finally stick on the ground. Normally snow is a welcome sight for Ingrid, but now it just makes her worry for her friends and the fragile resistance that she can only hope they are building. 

* * *

That night, Ingrid is trying to sleep, when a blurred shadow in front of the moon catches her attention. She sits up just in time to see a figure climbing in through her window. Ingrid scrambles to her feet, her heart pounding wildly in her chest. 

“Sylvain,” she breathes when the moonlight illuminates his red hair. 

He brushes a fine layer of snow out of his hair and smiles at her in the gloom of the room. “Ingrid,” he starts, but she cuts him off by throwing herself into his arms and hugging him tightly. 

He is warm and solid against her and she isn’t dreaming. She closes her eyes, breathing deeply to hold back her tears as she clings to Sylvain. One of his gloved hands strokes the back of her head while the other arm stays wrapped tightly around her waist as she leans into his warmth. 

“What are you doing here, Sylvain?” she asks. “Isn’t it dangerous for you to be here?”

“Probably,” he admits, leaning back a bit so that they can make eye contact. “But, Ingrid, it’s happening.”

She tenses. “What?”

“Dimitri came to the reunion,” Sylvain says. “He came and we’re going to do it. We’re going to rally the Kingdom and take down the Empire.” The hand on the back of her head slides around to rest lightly against her cheek. “We’ll come for you first.”

Ingrid frowns. “His Highness, is he alright?”

Sylvain’s expression falls a bit, but then he brightens. “Dimitri is struggling,” he admits, “but, Ingrid, the professor is back. Apparently, she was asleep for five years.”

Ingrid gasps at that. “The professor is back?”

“Yes,” he says. “She’s back and she’s going to help us. So, with her help, we should be able to convince Dimitri to mobilize to come to get you first.”

Ingrid swallows. “Sylvain, there is no way that you have the man-power to free Galatea as it stands.”

He frowns. “Not yet, but we will. I promise you.”

Ingrid leans into him again, letting her eyes shut as she feels his chest rise and fall as he breathes. Sylvain doesn’t quite seem sure of what he should be doing, but eventually, he just loops his arms around her and holds her close to him. 

“Are you okay, Ingrid?” he asks after a long moment. 

“I’m fine,” she lies. Seeing Sylvain has alleviated much of the tension on her mind and he has even brought her news. Plus, it’s more than a little comforting to just hold someone that she cares about without having to fear restraint.

Sylvain’s hand cups her face and he pushes her back, tilting her head up in the same motion. His eyes fix on her neck and Ingrid pulls a hand up to brush at the fading burn marks on her throat. She had thought they were gone, but if he is looking at them, then she hasn’t been that lucky. 

“They’re nothing, Sylvain,” she says. “Nothing compared to what I normally would face on a battlefield.”

He looks frustrated, his brown eyes glinting in the low light. “But the situation is very different. This is completely different from a battlefield, Ingrid.”

She takes a deep breath and tilts her head to the side. “Is it really though?”

He seems taken aback by her question and she watches him struggle with it for a moment. “You’re alone here,” he settles on. “You wouldn’t be alone on a battlefield.”

Ingrid forces herself to withdraw from his touch, stepping back and putting a bit of distance between them. “Sylvain, it can’t be safe for you to be here. I appreciate you coming, but you should go.”

His gaze darts down to the dark magic shackle on her foot. “That’s still a problem,” he mumbles. 

“Sylvain,” she says again, more insistently. “You need to go.”

He looks hurt and then frustrated and then disappointed. Ingrid steps back up to him and nudges him towards the window again. He holds onto her hand tightly before she draws back and he looks back at her. 

“We’re going to get you out of here,” he says lowly. “We’ll get rid of this thing on your leg and we’ll get you out of this damned tower.”

Ingrid smiles faintly. The idea is something to give her hope on any dark days that she will have ahead of her, but with the state that the resistance must be in, she knows that it is not something that will come to fruition in the immediate future. 

“Be safe,” she says to Sylvain as she nudges him towards the window again. 

He sits on the edge of it and looks back at her. “I’ll be back,” he promises again. “If not to get you out of here, then I’ll be back to update you in a week.”

Ingrid frowns. “Sylvain, do not put yourself in more danger for me!”

“The others want the same thing,” he assures. “They want you back with us and they want you to know what’s going on.”

Ingrid sighs. She knows that it is probably futile to try and talk him out of it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not terrifying to think about what happens if he gets caught. “Sylvain,” she says, her voice dropping in volume. She steps closer to him until she can feel the wind from outside the tower as he balances half-in and half-out of the tower. “Please be careful,” she whispers. 

He nods to that, and he squeezes her hand one last time before he lets it drop and swings his legs out the window and drops down and out of sight. Just like last time, there’s a blur of brown as he is caught by a wyvern that quickly speeds into a high climb into the night sky.

She turns back from the window quickly, her mind racing. Dimitri is alive and Dimitri had been at the reunion. Byleth is alive and ready to help the Kingdom: to lead the Blue Lions into battle. The Blue Lions are working on a plan to break her out. The hope that bubbles in her chest is almost enough to make her optimistic, but the dread of losing her friends still hangs heavily over her. She stumbles back to her cot and lays down, curling her hand over her heart as it hammers. 

Ingrid’s fingers stay warm where Sylvain’s touch had lingered until she falls asleep. 

* * *

Sylvain keeps his word and comes back to see her every week. He comes at different hours during the night to try and keep it varied, but Ingrid is always incredibly relieved to see him. The third week he comes, Ingrid hasn’t seen anyone all week so seeing his face is a welcome change.

He lingers a bit longer each time he visits, drawing out their precious time together when they get consecutive weeks in a row without getting caught. They stay relatively close to the window for the most part so that he can make a quick getaway if he needs to, but Ingrid seems to find herself drawn into his space. It’s as if she can’t help it. 

Sylvain is warm, both physically and socially, and she craves the contact more than anything. She’s pretty sure that she’s lost a large proportion of her muscle mass since she has been locked up here and Sylvain makes sure to bring her jerky and other small, portable treats every time that he comes. She wolfs down whatever he brings her and it helps make her feel slightly less weak. 

He’s furious about the situation and the fact that he can’t just break her out, Ingrid can tell, but there isn’t much to be done about it besides take notes on the weird magic shackle around her ankle and let him bring them back to Lysithea every week who has defected to join the Blue Lions. Apparently, Petra and Raphael and Marianne and Linhardt have also left their homes to reach the Monastery and Ingrid’s heart twinges with unfortunate jealousy for her friends from the Officer’s Academy. 

Tonight, she is leaning between Sylvain’s legs, nibbling on a piece of jerky while he tells her about the plans for the next week. Apparently, there is a group of Imperial soldiers that are gathering near the Monastery, likely preparing to try and recapture it, so their mission for the month will be to hold off any Imperial soldiers that venture in their direction. 

Ingrid swallows the last bite of jerky and leans a bit closer to Sylvain, tucking her legs underneath herself. “And Dimitri?”

Sylvain frowns. “He’s not–” he hesitates, visibly struggling.

Ingrid looks down, fiddling with his sleeve with one hand. “He’s not any better, is he?”

“No,” Sylvain agrees reluctantly. “He actually said something to me earlier though. It feels like it’s the first one-on-one conversation he and I have had since we got back to the Monastery.”

“What did he say?”

Sylvain’s jaw sets and he closes his hand over hers, tightening her grip on his cuff. “Nothing important.”

“Sylvain,” she says sternly. “What did he say?”

“That it isn’t worth it,” Sylvain says, his voice low and dark. “He said that I shouldn’t be coming here, shouldn’t be keeping you company or figuring out how to free you.”

Ingrid is _hurt_ that Dimitri would say something like that, but she can’t say she hasn’t thought the same thing. Sylvain takes a massive risk every time he comes to see her. Not only is he dangling a second Crested heir right under the noses of the Dukedom, but he is also a General in the Kingdom Army. Ingrid has no useful information for Cornelia, but she is sure that the woman would have some way to get what information she needed from Sylvain. It’s a terrifying thought. 

“Maybe he has a point,” Ingrid says quietly. 

Sylvain stiffens, indignant. “Ingrid.”

“No, Sylvain, you know that I’m right.”

His hand moves, cupping her face and turning it towards his. His eyes are almost orange in the faint glow of the heating runes and Ingrid’s breath catches as she realizes exactly how close they are. She hadn’t realized that she had migrated even closer to him while she had been thinking, but she definitely is closer to him than she had been before. 

“I’m not just going to leave you here alone,” he says firmly. His thumb rubs across her cheek and Ingrid holds her breath, still fixed on Sylvain’s eyes. “Besides,” he continues, leaning away just a half-inch, “you told me yourself. Cornelia isn’t here.”

It’s true. Ingrid had managed to overhear the guards talking a few days ago about how Cornelia had returned to Fhirdiad on urgent business. She can feel it in the shackle too. The dark magic hangs a little looser around her foot and the burning effect when she puts a part of her body out the window takes just the smallest moment longer to trigger. It’s because Cornelia, the focus of the spell, is far away. 

“That doesn’t mean it’s safe,” she says, her voice dropping. She tries to keep her tone even, but the thought of losing Sylvain–of losing the only person who has kept her sane in the last month and a half that she has been stuck in the damn tower–is absolutely horrifying. 

“Lysithea told me that she’s getting closer,” Sylvain says, changing the subject. “Linhardt and her have been working on it for a while. I think they’ll get it soon.”

Ingrid presses her lips together. “And what if they do. That doesn’t change the situation my people are in, Sylvain. The Empire still controls Galatea.”

Sylvain’s eyes glint. “Not for long. Look, this month we’re focusing on stocking up our defences at the Monastery, but next month we’re going to need more soldiers and more supplies. We’re going to have to march for Fraldarius, or at least a meeting point.”

Ingrid’s eyes widen. Galatea is directly on the road between Fraldarius and Garreg Mach. “Are you saying you’ll take Galatea by force when you march for Fraldarius?”

“Felix thinks we’ll actually be going to Ailell,” Sylvain replies. 

It makes sense. Ailell is a barren, lava-filled strip of land right outside of Galatea territory on the Alliance side. It wouldn’t be a hard detour for the army to take Galatea back from Cornelia’s forces before they headed onwards to Ailell to meet their reinforcements. 

There’s a noise from outside the tower door and Ingrid stiffens. She stares at the door, but it doesn’t open. She lets out a shaky breath as she turns back to Sylvain. 

“Okay,” she says. “You need to leave now.”

Sylvain doesn’t look happy about it, but he pushes himself up to his feet and offers her a hand. She takes it and lets him lift her up, but Sylvain uses the momentum to pull her forward into a fierce hug. She closes her eyes instinctively and smiles faintly. 

“I’m fine, Sylvain,” she assures. “I can handle another month.”

“I don’t want you to have to. You shouldn’t have to.”

She pulls back out of the hug and pushes on his stomach, nudging him towards the window. “Keep Garreg Mach safe. Focus on that. Then worry about me.”

Sylvain sits on the windowsill and slings one leg out the window, but then he hesitates. Ingrid crosses her arms and looks at him. He takes a shuddering breath and then reaches for her hand. She slowly unfolds her arms, letting him pull her hand forward. He is careful to keep her hand still inside the tower as he tugs on it. 

“Forgot something,” he mumbles.

Ingrid, unbalanced, stumbles forward right as Sylvain leans up and quickly–hurriedly–presses his lips to hers. The kiss is over before she even realizes that it is happening and then Sylvain drops her hand and is pushing out the window, dropping down onto his wyvern. Ingrid stands there, blinks, and then touches her lips. 

She has seen Sylvain out of this tower half a dozen times now, but this is the first time that he has kissed her. It feels like he has taken more than the usual piece of her with him when he left and Ingrid huffs. She turns away from the window, ignoring the warmth bubbling in her stomach. 

She already feels like a stupid girl from a fairytale. She doesn’t need to deal with this on top of everything else. 

* * *

Four days after the scheduled defence of Garreg Mach, Cornelia returns to Galatea. Ingrid can tell because the magic of the shackle tightens up and it glows a little brighter. She has taken to trying to do whatever physical strength training she can manage in the tiny tower room on only the scraps she is fed by the Imperials and whatever Sylvain smuggles her week-by-week. 

She has found herself pleasantly surprised with the strength that she has retained. Apparently, five years of light-eating and rigorous training has paid off. She finds herself feeling better than Cornelia probably expects her to. Ingrid knows that it also probably helps she has developed a pretty good resistance to magic, especially when she pushes herself some days by seeing how long she can withstand the burn of pushing her hand out the window, seeing if the shackle gives at all. 

Sylvain is supposed to come back in three days and it should be the last time that he has to sneak in to see her before the army lays siege to Galatea. He also should be bringing her an update on their exact plan for meeting the reinforcements from Fraldarius. 

Ingrid is in the middle of a round of sit-ups when the door bangs open. Cornelia is still wearing her dark wool cloak and she shrugs out of it, dumping it into the hands of the soldier escorting her, as she steps into the room. Ingrid quickly scrambles up to her feet and backs up, edging towards the window to keep as much space between her and the dark mage as possible. 

“Hello dear,” Cornelia says, her tone sickly sweet, “did you miss me?” 

Ingrid lifts her chin. “I hadn’t even noticed you went somewhere.”

Cornelia laughs shortly. “How cute. You really haven’t figured it out, have you?”

The confidence in Cornelia’s posture almost makes Ingrid falter. She is about to ask what Cornelia is talking about when the woman lifts her hand and snaps her fingers. The same familiar tendrils of dark magic fly out, coiling around Ingrid, and slamming her to her knees on the ground. 

Ingrid cries out from the burn of the magic and the sudden pain of slamming into stone. Cornelia just laughs again and slowly crosses the room towards Ingrid, keeping her hand extended outwards to ensure that the spell doesn’t falter. 

“You didn’t really think I wouldn’t notice, would you? You really thought that all of your little visits with the Gautier boy would go on uninterrupted until he could bring a battalion of your false king’s strongest men to break you out, did you?”

Ingrid feels sick suddenly. “No,” she mumbles in disbelief.

Cornelia scoffs, lifting her other hand and grabbing Ingrid’s face. Her nails dig into her cheeks as she stares into Ingrid’s eyes, wearing a cruel smile. “As I said, it’s cute.” She drops Ingrid’s face and then tightens her other hand. 

Ingrid flinches as the magic burns into her, hotter and with a stronger intensity than normal. “Why?” she gasps out. “Why did you let him continue to come if you knew?”

“Because,” Cornelia replies, “it makes it so much better when I get to break your hope now.” The magic sears brighter and Ingrid’s eyes close as she struggles against the magic bonds. “I wonder if he’ll think you sold him out when he arrives here in three days to see you and you’re nowhere to be found.” She leans in closer so that Ingrid can smell the sharp, expensive perfume that clings to her. “I wonder how you’ll scream when I break him right in front of you.”

Cornelia leans back then and there’s a sharp crack as she slaps Ingrid in the face. The magic recedes as soon as the slap connects and Ingrid is dropped forward onto the stone floor at Cornelia’s feet. 

Ingrid tries to push herself up, but her arms tremble, weak from whatever magic Cornelia had been holding her with. She lifts her head in time to watch Cornelia cross back across the room, pausing in the doorway of the tower. She smiles over her shoulder at Ingrid and the mockery in it makes Ingrid sick. 

“It’s been a lovely two months with you, dear,” Cornelia taunts, “and I’ll be happy to tie them up nicely by bringing in Gautier and whoever else he might be stupid enough to bring with him.”

The door slams shut and Ingrid finally manages to sit up despite the burning ache in her entire body. The dark magic has burned through the thin shirt and pants she is wearing and has left faint, purple burns on her arms and legs where the fabric had scorched away. They are the same kind of marks that she has where the shackle burns her. 

“No,” Ingrid breathes. “She can’t know.” _She can’t_.

But she does. Cornelia knows and Sylvain is coming in three days and he’ll be walking straight into a trap. If Cornelia knows about Sylvain visiting the tower and about the fact that Ingrid had known that she was in Fhirdiad, it is almost certain that she also knows that the Kingdom is going to attempt to meet troops at Ailell.

Ingrid pushes herself up to her feet and staggers towards the window. She has to get out of here. She has to break herself out of the damn tower so that Sylvain doesn’t have to come and get her: so that he doesn’t fly himself into a trap. She can’t let him get hurt for her, especially since she hadn’t been successful in convincing him not to endanger himself for her in the first place. She had been so desperate for human contact–for Sylvain’s touch–that she had been stupid. 

She leans towards the window, reaching out with one hand. She ignores the flare of pain in her ankle as she pushes her hand past the inside of the window. To her horror, her palm thuds against something cool and solid about halfway out. Ingrid jerks her hand back and then slams it forward again, pounding against the magical barrier that closes her in the room. 

She pulls back, stopping the burning of the shackle and stares in horror. The block is likely one-way, but it also means that no matter how she fights or screams on the night that Sylvain is going to come back, he won’t be able to see or hear that anything is wrong. 

Ingrid stumbles backwards until her legs bump the cot and she collapses down onto it. She is aching all over from the still-fresh burns from Cornelia’s magic and her cheek stings from the force of the slap. Her stomach is turning wildly and the only reason she doesn’t throw up is because she knows that if she does she will have to deal with the smell of her own sick. 

She stares at the window as her heart sinks into her stomach. Cornelia’s plan to taunt her days before Sylvain’s arrival is working exactly as planned. All of the confidence that has been building in her recently, between Sylvain’s passed-on information and her own strength, has drained out of her and she feels completely hopeless. 

She covers her mouth as her eyes fill with tears. “What have I done?” she whispers to herself. 

* * *

Ingrid tries everything she can think of. She tries to kick out the block in the window. She tries pushing through with no force and then with a lot of force. She even breaks the leg off the cot and tries to slam that through the window. Nothing she does makes a difference. Whatever magic is sealed across the window is there to stay and she can’t do anything about it. 

She hardly sleeps for the three days, fear coiling in her stomach alongside a sickening dread about what is going to happen when Sylvain does arrive. Since her warning, Cornelia has left Ingrid to simmer in the tower alone without hardly a sound on the other side of her door. She is still fed, but the portion is smaller than usual and Ingrid almost can’t keep it down.

The night that Sylvain is supposed to arrive, Cornelia brings the food herself. She steps inside, holding the tray, and Ingrid’s eyes flicker to the hulking soldier that stands just behind Cornelia. Cornelia doesn’t try to hide her smug smirk as she holds out the food. 

“Not hungry, girl?”

Ingrid stands up from the now-broken cot and steps back, moving away from Cornelia. “No,” she replies, keeping her voice even. 

Cornelia doesn’t even flinch, dropping the tray to the ground. It clatters loudly and the food splatters across the stone. She steps towards Ingrid and Ingrid moves to step back, but the shackle around her ankle burns into her and she stumbles. Cornelia snaps her fingers and Ingrid feels the burn of dark magic crawl up her leg and she stumbles, trying to force her body to move. 

Cornelia clicks her tongue at Ingrid’s retreat. She doesn’t advance any further herself as the soldier who had accompanied her strides across the tower towards Ingrid. Ingrid tries to dodge out of the way of the man’s reaching hands, but she is both distracted by Cornelia’s magic and too slow. The man grabs her arm and wrenches it behind her back. 

Ingrid cries out and struggles, but it doesn’t matter as the man clamps iron shackles down over her wrists, forcing them behind her back. Her wrists are chained separately and once the cuffs are in place, the man drops her. Ingrid crumples forward, yanking at her hands, but the soldier just drags the chains backwards, dragging her across the floor of the tower until he reaches the wall to the right of the window. 

Ingrid, struggling against the chains, watches futilely as he loops the chains through a mounted metal ring on the wall, yanking them tight to pull her to the wall. Ingrid resists, but the soldier has the advantage here, and she ends up tripping and being dragged across the stone until he locks the chains in place. 

Ingrid manages to tuck her legs under herself and jerks at the chains again, trying to pull away from the wall, but she is thoroughly restrained. Cornelia scoffs at Ingrid’s struggle and walks towards her. Cornelia looks down at her, narrowing her eyes. She seems to consider something for a moment and then she waves her hand to the soldier. 

“Gag her. I don’t need her screaming bloody murder for her noble brat the moment he arrives.”

Ingrid bites the man’s finger as he forces a strip of cloth through her mouth. He swears lowly, but he does manage to roughly tie it around the back of her head. He catches some of her hair in the knot and Ingrid winces as her hair pulls. She struggles against the chains again, frustrated and scared and angry. 

Cornelia laughs again. “Don’t you just look like the pinnacle of a perfect damsel?” She sneers. “It’s a shame you won’t be rescued, isn’t it?”

With that, Cornelia leaned forward, pressing her hand to Ingrid’s forehead. There was a sharp spark of dark magic and then Ingrid’s vision went black. 

* * *

Ingrid comes to when a warm hand touches her face. She groans softly at the throbbing in her skull and slowly forces her eyes open. Her head is lolled so she’s staring down at her lap and the stone floor and the hand on her face carefully guides her face up until she’s staring at the blurry face of Sylvain. 

Ingrid’s eyes widen in horror and she jerks back, the chains rattling on the stone as she presses herself against the wall, staring at Sylvain in horror. His expression twists and he slides closer to her, kneeling on the stone. 

“It’s okay, Ingrid!” he says. He’s trying to be reassuring, but Ingrid just looks around wildly, searching for any sign of Cornelia. She doesn’t immediately see her, but there is no way that she isn’t here, especially since she had knocked Ingrid unconscious. 

Sylvain frowns when Ingrid doesn’t appear to calm down at all and he reaches out and carefully unties the gag, being cautious of the knotted pieces of her hair. As soon as he pulls it out of her mouth Ingrid tries to push him back with her shoulder, jerking against the chains anchoring her to the wall. 

“You have to leave!” she hisses. 

Sylvain blinks. “What? Ingrid, you’re chained to the wall. What’s happening?”

“Sylvain, you have to go!” Ingrid insists, ignoring his question. “You have to get out of here!”

Sylvain still seems confused by her insistence, but he does look around the room this time, his lips curling into a deeper frown. “Ingrid, what are you talking about?”

“Cornelia knows!” she snaps finally. 

Sylvain’s eyes widen, but before she can say anything else, she is cut off by the sound of slow, amused clapping. Sylvain shoots to his feet, spinning around to face Cornelia where she had previously been invisible. There are two soldiers with her standing on the other side of the tower, staring down Sylvain and Ingrid. 

“What a lovely show,” Cornelia drawls, her eyes glint in the red light that is cast off the inside of the tower walls.

Sylvain draws his sword. He normally fights with a lance or an axe and Ingrid knows his sword prowess is not very expansive. Felix and Dimitri are both much better sword fighters than Sylvain, but the sword is apparently the only weapon that Sylvain has brought with him to her tower since an axe or lance would be too large for the normally stealthy missions he had been undertaking while visiting her. 

His shoulders are tense as he faces down Cornelia. “Cornelia,” he greets coldly. 

Cornelia’s sickening smile doesn’t waver. “You’re peculiar, Gautier. Most soldiers would stand down when their _king_ tells them to drop a subject, but you pursued this anyway. Could it be that there is something more in your adorable dedication to this girl?”

“Let her go, Cornelia,” Sylvain hisses. He doesn’t turn back to face Ingrid, but Ingrid can read the tension in every muscle in his body. 

Cornelia rolls her eyes. “Cute.” She steps towards Sylvain. “I’m not going to be doing anything. You, on the other hand, are going to step to your right.”

Sylvain’s grip on his sword tightens. “Or what.”

Ingrid has been watching the exchange silently up until this point, but she cries out when her leg starts to burn as the magic sears into her skin with an uncommon intensity. She thrashes against the wall in the chains when the magic doesn’t fade.

“Or else,” Cornelia mocks, pointing past Sylvain at Ingrid where she slumps to the side, trying to catch her breath as the magic continues to burn into her, “I’ll make her scream until we’re all deaf and she doesn’t have a voice left to use.”

The pain crawling up her leg from the magic makes her breathing stutter and she bites the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste blood. Sylvain’s expression crumples as he looks back at her and he hastily steps to the side, stepping away from Ingrid. 

“Okay!” he snarls. “Just stop it!” 

Cornelia laughs. “You’re predictable, boy.” She drops the searing magic and Ingrid gasps, weakly lifting her head to stare at Sylvain, guilt curdling in her stomach so intensely that she is almost sick. “Keep moving,” Cornelia orders. 

Sylvain takes another few steps and Ingrid makes a weak noise of protest, but she goes ignored by both Sylvain and Cornelia who circle the room slowly and continuously until Sylvain is almost right in front of the two soldiers and Cornelia is in front of Ingrid. 

Cornelia keeps her eyes on Sylvain as she bends down, grabbing Ingrid’s face and letting her nails dig into Ingrid’s cheeks. “Eyes up, girl,” she hisses. 

As soon as she speaks, both of the soldiers attack Sylvain. Sylvain’s poor swordsmanship is immediately put to the test as one of the guards, a brawler, strikes him in the stomach hard enough to wind him. Ingrid whimpers and tries to look away, but Cornelia’s grip on her face tightens, forcing her to watch as the other guard rips Sylvain’s weapon away and he is pummelled again. 

After a moment, the guards stop, dragging Sylvain up between them, restraining him across the tower from Ingrid. Cornelia hums mockingly.

“What a shame,” she says. She drops Ingrid’s face and Ingrid recoils away from her, pressing back against the wall, but keeping her eyes fixed on where Sylvain is being restrained. 

Cornelia leaves Ingrid, walking slowly back across the tower. She kicks away Sylvain’s sword and studies him with narrowed eyes. “You’re a fool,” she tells him. 

Sylvain struggles in the grip of the soldiers, but they hold him tightly. Ingrid curls her hands around the chains holding her down slowly, trying to keep them from rattling too much. Her eyes dart around the room as she futilely scans for anything that might be of use. There is nothing in the tower that isn’t normally here, plus she can’t be sure that the block on the window isn’t still there. 

As Cornelia continues to taunt Sylvain, Ingrid looks down. The shackle around her ankle is still pulsing and glowing as it always does, meaning she’s not going anywhere even if she gets herself out of the chains that are locking her to the wall. She has one very bad idea for how she might be able to get out of the chain, but it doesn’t account for any of the other magics on the tower that will foil her escape efforts. 

She focuses back on Sylvain and Cornelia just in time to see Sylvain get his knees kicked out as the guards force him down to his knees in front of Cornelia, still holding his arms behind his back. Sylvain catches her eyes and the annoyance and pain in his expression cracks with worry and Ingrid sits up straighter, her chest tightening. 

Cornelia follows Sylvain’s gaze and looks back at Ingrid. Cornelia keeps her eyes on Ingrid as she reaches out a hand, twisting it into Sylvain’s hair, gripping his head tightly. Sylvain grunts as his head tilts into her grip as she pulls on his hair. 

“Maybe I ought to give you an incentive to listen to me, hm?” Cornelia murmurs. 

Ingrid watches her hand pulse black where it’s gripping Sylvain’s head and then Sylvain thrashes, crying out in pain. Ingrid instinctively jerks against the chains, trying to get closer to him, and Cornelia just laughs. 

“Sylvain!” Ingrid finally cries when Cornelia holds the magic to his head as he struggles and groans.

When she yells for him, Cornelia pulls her hand back, smirking. Sylvain goes limp in the grip of the soldiers and Ingrid’s stomach twists violently. Sylvain is physically stronger than her and he can take a physical hit, but Ingrid definitely has the advantage between the two of them when it comes to magic. As a Pegasus Knight, Ingrid is a master of dealing with mages, but Sylvain flies on a wyvern and avoids magic users. 

Sylvain stirs slowly in the guards' grip and Cornelia looks thoughtful for a moment. She walks towards Ingrid and waves for the guards to follow her. They drag Sylvain up to his full height and he stumbles as he is dragged over so that they are only a few feet apart. Ingrid pulls at the chains holding her hands back again, instinct propelling her closer to Sylvain. 

Cornelia snaps her fingers in front of Sylvain’s face. He jolts and his head snaps up as he winces. 

“Sylvain,” Ingrid murmurs, still straining to reach him. 

He shakes his head. “M’fine,” he mutters, but his words slur together and she only gets more worried.

“What do you want from us, Cornelia?” Ingrid demands, trying to keep the dark mage’s attention focused on us. 

Cornelia scoffs. “There’s the small matter of military intelligence, but then, of course, there is the ulterior motive of seeing your Crests at work.” She holds out a hand, palm up, and then clenches her fist suddenly. 

Ingrid can’t help the scream that tears from her chest as piercing pain courses through her veins, emanating from her ankle where the band of dark magic hovers. She slumps to the side as the magic rips through her body, leaving her writhing in pain on the cold stone. 

“Ingrid!” Sylvain yells, sounding more alert. 

There’s a flash of white light around Ingrid and the chains holding her to the wall creak under unexpected force as her Crest activates. The Crest of Daphnel is not something that Ingrid attributes a lot of her strength to, but she can’t deny that it hums in her veins when she wields her Relic and in times of desperation. 

As soon as her Crest goes off, Cornelia drops the spell and Ingrid trembles against the stone, lying on her side before slowly shifting and pushing herself back up despite the aches piercing through her body. 

“Crests are the lifeblood of Faerghus,” Cornelia reminds. “Their strength runs in both of your veins and I have some friends who would be highly interested in exploring those processes once I’m done with you.”

Ingrid wheezes when she breathes which she attributes to the stabbing pain in her chest, likely a broken rib or two. She rests against the wall, feeling suddenly exhausted as she looks at Sylvain. Her eyes burn with tears at the panic and ferocious anger in his gaze because she feels weak and stupid and helpless and absolutely terrified that she is going to lose him. 

“Now, _boy_ ,” Cornelia sneers. “Are you going to tell me about the Kingdom’s plans or do you need further _convincing_?”

Sylvain lifts his head, a challenge glinting in his eyes and Cornelia’s manicured lips twist into a frown. Ingrid can do nothing but watch helplessly as Cornelia snaps her fingers and dark magic swirls around Sylvain. He winces at the pain which Ingrid knows as a familiar sensation by now and the guards step back as Sylvain is held down by Cornelia’s magic. 

The light in the room dims a bit and Ingrid’s brows knit. She tilts her head to the side and notices that the heating runes on the inside of the tower have faded. Ingrid rapidly tries to scrounge up every shred of magic theory that she had overheard Annette and Mercedes talking about during her time at the Academy. 

Dimly, from somewhere in her memory, she recalls the fact that mages can only channel their energy in so many places at one time. If the magic in the runes has faded, it is because Cornelia is channelling too much of her energy towards restraining Sylvain. Once the magic has a grip on Sylvain, the guards step away, nodding to Cornelia before they leave, the door swinging shut behind them. Ingrid is left alone with Cornelia and Sylvain. 

Cornelia walks in a slow circle around Sylvain, studying him. “Unfortunately for you, I don’t have the months I did for your girlfriend to break you.” When she’s standing behind him, she grabs a fistful of his hair, jerking his head back. 

Sylvain grunts and Ingrid jolts forward. “Stop!” she cries. 

Cornelia stills, staring at Ingrid. “You’re not the one with the information I need,” she points out calmly. 

Ingrid’s chest heaves. “He’s not going to tell you anything,” she pleads. There is something dark and almost manic in Sylvain’s expression now that it is twisted in pain. She has not seen this look on his face for five years–since he murdered his brother. “You’ll never get it out of him by torturing him.”

Cornelia considers that and loosens her hand in Sylvain’s hair. Keeping her eyes fixed on Ingrid, she strokes Sylvain’s hair like he’s some kind of pet. “You have so much confidence in the young man,” she drawls. “How can you be sure?”

“I am sure,” Ingrid asserts, dodging the question. “Please,” she says, her voice dropping so it’s almost desperate. “Don’t hurt him.”

Something clicks in Cornelia’s expression. She releases Sylvain and walks back over to Ingrid, smiling down at her sharply. “Of course not. If I want the information from him, I’ll just break you in his place.”

Ingrid squirms back, but Cornelia’s hand touches her head before she can lean fully away and there’s a sharp pulse of pain as dark magic assaults her head. She cries out and snaps back, banging her head against the stone. 

“Stop!” Sylvain yells, his voice breaking. “Stop it!”

Cornelia laughs. “So predictable.” 

She turns back to Sylvain and lifts her left hand. Ingrid watches shadows cluster in her hand until she’s holding a deadly looking blade. There’s a faint pop of white from by the window as the block on the window disappears and a gust of wind blows into the tower. Ingrid’s breath hitches. Whatever this blade Cornelia is holding is, it is a massive drain on her concentration.

The shackle around her ankle flickers a few times as Cornelia leans towards Sylvain, holding her knife of shadowed magic. 

“Tell me,” Cornelia snaps at Sylvain, “what is the Kingdom army planning in Ailell?” 

To punctuate her point, she stabs the point of the shadow dagger into Sylvain’s shoulder and he writhes, screaming in pain. Slowly, Cornelia presses the magic in and Sylvain seizes against her, screaming. As the magic presses into him, the magic around Sylvain pulses and darkens and there’s a faint flicker of purple around Ingrid’s leg. Startled, she looks down. 

The shadow flickers out around her ankle and Ingrid takes a deep breath, closing her eyes and focusing intently on the one magic lesson she had suffered through in school. Her fingers burn freezing cold as ice shoots out along the chains holding her arms back in a sharp burst of blue light.

Ingrid staggers up, jerking on the frozen chains hard enough that they burst in a screeching clang. Her fingers are blistered from the intensity of the cold spell, but it had worked. Cornelia wheels back towards Ingrid, looking completely taken aback, and Ingrid dives for Sylvain’s sword. 

She grabs the blade and spins upwards in a neat motion, slashing at Cornelia. Cornelia shrieks and leaps back, her concentration breaking on the spell restraining Sylvain. There is still residual dark magic curling around his shoulder where he had been stabbed with the blade and Ingrid hurries forward, catching Sylvain before he can buckle to the ground. 

He groans, but stumbles, hauling himself up as best he can. He’s heavy as he leans against her, but Ingrid grips him tightly and jerks him out of the way of a Miasma that Cornelia shoots at them. The mage’s eyes are glowing with murderous intent. Ingrid looks at the window of the tower and her stomach flips. She will have one chance and if she is wrong about the protections on the tower being gone they are screwed. 

Ingrid doesn’t hesitate again, refusing to let Cornelia get another shot off. She hauls Sylvain the last two steps to the window and practically throws both of them over the windowsill into the open air. They plummet blindly for a moment and then there’s a wyvern’s screech. They hit the wyvern hard, and awkwardly, as it spirals upwards. 

Ingrid’s muscles scream in protest as she grabs the saddle desperately, dropping Sylvain’s sword so that she can keep one hand on him and one on the wyvern. Sylvain groans, but he manages to shift himself so that he’s grabbing the saddle as well, slumped forward against her. He also twists his arm into a strap on the saddle: security in case he falls. 

A blinding flash of purple shoots up past them in the sky as Cornelia shoots at them from the window of the tower and Ingrid’s breath hitches as she urges the wyvern into a steeper climb to get them farther away from the tower. 

She isn’t used to flying on wyverns and she’s absolutely _freezing_ this high up in the air, but Sylvain is with her and the wind is whipping through her hair and _she is free_. 

* * *

Ingrid flies towards Garreg Mach, shivering the saddle and hunching down against Sylvain. She had hoped to fly further, but the moment that Sylvain’s hand on her waist slips away, Ingrid urges the wyvern to the ground, fear coiling in her stomach. 

The landing is rough and Ingrid almost throws herself from the saddle, but she’s running on enough adrenaline that she keeps her positioning long enough to hop out of the saddle and drag Sylvain down after her. 

Sylvain’s eyes are shut and his weight is heavy and limp against her and Ingrid swallows back the fear in her chest. She leans him against the wyvern and pulls back the collar of his shirt enough to see the wound that Cornelia’s dark magic had left. He’s bleeding heavily because he had been stabbed, but it’s the curling dark smoke that the wound is emitting that worries her. 

“Sylvain,” she murmurs, poking his non-injured shoulder. 

He lets out a muffled groan and his eyes flutter. " _Ing_ –” His voice breaks on her name as he tries to force it out. 

Ingrid swallows, still staring at the wound. “Sylvain, I need to know. Did you come alone? I can’t get you to the monastery myself.”

“Mercedes and others,” he grunts, “waiting over the western ridge.”

Ingrid’s head snaps up. The western ridge is about 10 minutes behind them, but she doesn’t know how to get herself there, much less Sylvain–who appears to be in danger of bleeding out in front of her. 

Sylvain’s hand moves, grabbing her wrist and curling tightly. “Go,” he urges harshly. 

Ingrid shakes her head immediately. “No. I’m not leaving you.” She leaves out the fact that her entire body feels as weak as a wet leaf because she’s freezing cold and still feeling the aches of her own injuries from Cornelia’s magic. 

Sylvain frowns and leans forward, his face scrunching up as his shoulder shifts. Ingrid frowns at him, but Sylvain just twists, pushing at the flank of his wyvern. He whistles sharply and the beast jolts up, screeching loudly. Sylvain slumps towards Ingrid and she lets her arms wrap around him as she catches him as the wyvern moves away. 

Sylvain’s forehead presses into the crook of her shoulder and his breath is hot on her skin. “Free,” he murmurs. “Ingrid, you’re free.”

“Shut up, Sylvain,” she snaps, tightening her arms around him.

She tilts her head back, scanning the sky as she watches his wyvern fly away. Sylvain’s hand tightens around her wrist and she feels his breath in a puff of air as he lets out a strained laugh. 

“This isn’t how tonight was supposed to go.”

“Shut up, Sylvain,” she repeats, but her eyes are hot with tears. “They’ll be here soon.”

“You’re cold,” he notes, pressing his nose against her shoulder. He shifts, wincing, and tries to wrap his arms around her. Ingrid can’t help but lean into his warmth, shivering, but she also shifts, pushing the heel of her hand against his shoulder. It probably hurts like hell, but she needs him to stay conscious.

Sylvain hisses and she huffs. “Stay awake,” she presses. “You can’t go to sleep, Sylvain.”

“Wasn’t planning on it,” he hums quietly, but his words slur together enough to tell Ingrid that it might not be intentional. 

She tilts her head back, looking up again, and then blinks as a snowflake catches in her eyelashes. She and Sylvain are slumped together on the ground and it feels like it has been forever since the wyvern had taken off looking for help. Yet, as she eyes the ridge to her right, she sees the silhouettes of several figures moving towards them. 

Sylvain’s head, where it is pressed into her shoulder, turns as he looks over at the now-rapidly approaching figures. He laughs faintly. “Look at that,” he mutters, “we’re saved.”

Ingrid isn’t as optimistic as Sylvain until she realizes that the figure leading the charge down the hill towards her is Felix. Her hands tighten around Sylvain and she pushes her palm into his wound again, trying to stop what bleeding she can. She feels completely numb when their friends finally reach them. 

Felix pulls Ingrid up to her feet and pulls her into a fierce, tight hug. Her arms are trapped at her side and she basically melts into Felix’s warmth, her head pressing against his shoulder as she shivers, once again reminded of how _cold_ she is. 

Mercedes drops to her knees by Sylvain, immediately going for the Fortify spell to give both of them a boost of healing. The white magic settles into Ingrid’s veins and she inhales sharply at the warmth that shoots through her body. Somehow, it almost makes her pain worse as the warmth it brings, makes her suddenly very aware of the blistering pain in her fingers and the lingering aches from the dark magic.

Ingrid stumbles against Felix, her leg nearly giving out, and he swears, catching her weight. It’s as if all the adrenaline that she has been running off of since Cornelia had first caught Sylvain in the tower has evaporated, leaving her exhausted and weak. 

“Mercedes,” Felix says, but his voice sounds like it's passing through water to reach Ingrid’s ears. She closes her eyes and presses her forehead harder into his shoulder, exhaling shakily. 

Mercedes says something, but it is just a jumble of sounds as Ingrid’s head spins suddenly. She tries to lean back away from Felix to say something, but as soon as she moves her head, her vision darkens and her consciousness slips away. 


	2. II - KNIGHT

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back at the Monastery, it's been five years. Some things have changed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we are...the second of two with a much less satisfying word count. Either way, this was a grind to both write and edit but I'm happy to finally get to share it. Thanks to the Sylvgrid Discord as always <3
> 
> TW this chapter mostly for PTSD as well as just general recovery from traumatic events and injuries. 
> 
> Last chapter was the hurt, this one's the comfort :)
> 
>   
> 

**II - KNIGHT**

* * *

Ingrid comes to lying in a real bed. She holds her breath for a moment as her mind races, trying to put together all the pieces of what had happened. She barely remembers anything past jumping from the tower with Sylvain, but she reasons that she must have passed out. She lifts one of her hands slowly, to rub at her face, and then stops when she sees that her arms are wrapped in bandages from the elbow down. Her fingers are swaddled too, as if she’s wearing gloves. 

“You had frostbite,” a calm voice informs her. 

Ingrid twists at that, tensing, but there is only one other person in the room who is definitely not Cornelia or an Imperial soldier. Marianne von Edmund stands near the door, looking very exhausted, but she smiles faintly at Ingrid. Marianne and Ingrid have never been particularly close, but they had shared a wall during their time at the Officer’s Academy. 

With a start, Ingrid realizes that she recognizes the room that she’s in. It’s her old dorm room. She swallows and shifts in the bed, pushing herself up. Marianne walks towards her, being sure to be open about her movements so that Ingrid isn’t startled by anything that she does. 

“Was it from a Blizzard spell?” Marianne asks quietly. “It was a bit familiar to me, but I’ve never seen that kind of backfire on one before.”

Ingrid laughs weakly and looks at her wrapped hands. Now that she focuses on them, she can feel the faint, painful tingle in her digits that is indicative of frostbite, as Marianne had said. “I think so,” she admits. “I’ve never been good at magic, but I didn’t have very many options.”

Marianne nods slowly. She holds a hand out to Ingrid, tracing the flowing sigil for Heal. The magic soothes her lingering pains and Ingrid lets out a slow sigh at the relief. 

“Thank you,” she murmurs. 

Marianne’s smile is hesitant and unsure, but she nods. “It’s the least I can do.” She steps back and moves like she’s going to leave the room and Ingrid’s heart flips in her chest. 

“Wait! Marianne! Is everyone else alright?”

Marianne hesitates. “Mostly.”

Before she can elaborate, the door swings open and Ingrid finds herself staring at a ghost. Even though Sylvain had told her that the professor was alive, it’s one thing to know something and another to see it herself. Byleth stands, one hand on the doorknob and half in the room, looking between Ingrid and Marianne. 

“Oh,” she says, her pale green eyes widening. “I was just coming to see if you needed anything Marianne, but, Ingrid, you’re awake!”

Ingrid just stares for a moment. Marianne’s smile drops a bit and she leans towards the professor, mumbling something before she slips out of the room. Byleth’s expression tightens and she closes the door behind Marianne, slowly approaching the bed. 

“How are you feeling?” Byleth asks. 

Ingrid isn’t sure. She’s still cold and her hands hurt, but it’s honestly not any different than the last two months she had spent locked in a tower. When she doesn’t answer right away, Byleth reaches out a hand slowly and touches Ingrid’s elbow. Her professor’s hand glows white as Byleth gives some of her own healing magic and pain that Ingrid hadn’t registered fades away. 

Ingrid must seem surprised because Byleth smiles sympathetically at her. “You’ve been through a lot. Mercedes and Manuela wore themselves out and Marianne, Linhardt, and I have been doing what we could since.” Byleth pauses, pressing her lips together as she carefully chooses her next words. “Ingrid, some of the scars and injuries we healed on you–” she says gently. 

Ingrid drops her gaze down, taking a shaky breath. “Please, Professor, I am well aware of what happened to me in that tower.”

“I’m sorry,” Byleth says simply. “You were very brave. Sylvain told us all about it. He was rather frustrated that there wasn’t much that we could do with the situation.”

Ingrid tenses, jolting up a bit in the bed. Her sore body screams at the movement and Byleth hurriedly catches her, gently pressing her back down against the pillows. 

“Sylvain!” Ingrid exclaims. “Is he alright?”

Byleth sighs. “We’ve healed what we can, but the wound in his shoulder is troubling.” She frowns. “I don’t suppose you know what caused it, do you?”

“Some kind of super-concentrated dark magic,” Ingrid answers immediately. “I don’t know much about magic, but that’s what it was. It was the reason that the shackle dropped and that I was able to even get us out the window.”

Byleth nods slowly. “Lysithea had surmised as much. She and Linhardt have been working as hard as they can, but it’s puzzling.” Byleth looks at Ingrid’s bandaged arms. “For someone who always claimed that they had no magical aptitude, that must have been some Blizzard.”

Ingrid frowns. “I had to.”

“I’m sure you did, Ingrid, but you’re safe now.” Her professor touches her shoulder reassuringly. “Please, get some more sleep. I’ll pass on the news that you’re awake and I’ll try to keep them to one visitor at a time, but you know how they can be.”

Ingrid imagines Annette and Ashe, just as filled with sunshine as they had been five years ago. Felix is enthusiastic in his own way: quiet, but no less protective and interested. Mercedes is probably sleeping off how much healing she had had to administer to Ingrid and Sylvain, but she would be warm and gentle when she came. 

She nods to Byleth. “Okay,” she says quietly. She takes a slow, deep breath and winces at the twinge of pain in her ribs. 

Byleth stands up, lingering over her bedside for a moment longer. “You’re safe, Ingrid. I promise.”

* * *

Ingrid wakes up next to the sound of faint, girlish laughter. She stirs with a faint groan and the laugh breaks off into a gasp, followed by a voice that is both familiar and a little foreign to her. 

“Mercie, she’s awake!” 

Ingrid blinks, turning her head towards the sound of the voice and sees Annette sitting in the chair to her right. Annette’s blue eyes are wide as she stares at Ingrid and Ingrid feels like she has been shoved through some kind of time-portal because the baby-fat that had trimmed Annette’s face as a teenager is gone. Her red hair is longer, curling around her shoulders and she’s wearing real mage robes that make her look like the Warlock she had dreamed of being. 

Ingrid’s eyes then trail over Annette’s shoulder to the figure behind her. Mercedes looks mostly the same, except for the absence of her long hair, having replaced it with a short, elegant bob that hangs around her ears. She’s wearing a hat on top of it and Ingrid’s eyes well up with tears so suddenly that she’s crying before she realizes what’s happening. 

“Oh! Ingrid, are you in pain?” Annette asks frantically, her hands flailing a bit.

Ingrid laughs tearily and lifts a bandaged hand, clumsily wiping her face. “No,” she assures quickly. It’s not entirely truth or lie, but the tears are more from feeling so suddenly overwhelmed at seeing her friends again. “I’m just,” she trails off, unsure of how to put it into words. 

Mercedes smiles warmly and steps forward, leaning next to Annette. “We’re so glad to have you back, Ingrid.”

Ingrid sniffs and laughs faintly. “Yeah, I’m just really glad to see you guys.”

Annette sniffles and then stiffens as if she’s holding herself back. “Can I hug you?” she blurts. 

Ingrid laughs a little more comfortably as she pushes herself up into a half-sitting position and beckons Annette into a hug. The redhead beams and leans into the hug, gripping Ingrid tightly and then Mercedes floats in, carefully adding herself to the hug.

The contact is almost foreign to Ingrid. She hasn’t hugged another woman in what could be years and she had hardly touched another person besides Sylvain during his scarce visits in the last two months. Someone’s hand, either Annette’s or Mercedes’s brushes against the back of Ingrid’s head, touching the roughly slashed ends of her hair and Ingrid’s mind flashes back to the tower and the way that Cornelia had wrenched her hair around and she jerks back, eyes wide and heart hammering. 

Both Annette and Mercedes look surprised by Ingrid’s visceral, sudden reaction, but compassion floods through Mercedes’s eyes as she realizes what had just happened. Ingrid wraps her arms around herself, exhaling shakily as she realizes that just the simple act of touching her hair had triggered something in her. 

Mercedes gently touches Ingrid’s hand. “You’re okay, Ingrid,” she assures softly. Ingrid takes a deep breath. “You’re at Garreg Mach Monastery. No one here is going to hurt you.”

Annette’s expression pinches into something worried and it slowly relaxes as Ingrid takes a few more deep breaths, letting the tension drop out of her shoulders. Annette doesn’t move to touch Ingrid again, just watching silently for a moment until Ingrid’s heart rate settles back to normal. 

“I know where I am,” Ingrid replies quietly. “I know that I’m here and that no one wants to hurt me, I just–” she cuts herself off, shaking her head. 

“It’s okay,” Annette assures. “Ingrid, what you went through–”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says firmly. 

“I wasn’t going to ask you to,” Annette assures. “I just wanted to say that you’re incredibly brave for what you did. And that we’re glad you’re here with us.”

Ingrid’s hackles drop a bit more and she lifts a wrapped hand to her hair, touching the roughly shorn ends. She eyes Mercedes’s chopped hair and she swallows. “My hair,” she murmurs. 

Annette and Mercedes exchange a look and Ingrid figures that either Felix or Sylvain or both had told them that Cornelia had used her hair to send a message a few months back. Ingrid takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. 

“Can you cut it?” she asks quietly. 

“Your hair?” Annette asks. “It’s already shorter than it used to be,” she murmurs. 

Ingrid shakes her head. “I want it done on my own terms,” she mumbles. 

“Oh,” Annette says timidly. “Mercie, do we have scissors?”

“I think there are some in the medical kit,” Mercedes replies. 

There’s a rustling noise in the background and Ingrid opens her eyes. Mercedes emerges from her medical kit with a pair of scissors that don’t look like they’ll be good for much more than cutting up strips of bandage. Ingrid suppresses the laugh that bubbles in her chest. 

“Can you even manage with those?”

Mercedes laughs lightly. “I have no idea. Do you want us to try?”

Ingrid shrugs. “Sure.”

“Why don’t we get you in the chair so Mercie can do the cuts and I can catch you up on everything you’ve missed!” Annette suggests brightly. She hops out of the chair quickly and helps Ingrid sit up. 

Ingrid’s ribs still ache and Mercedes quickly informs her that the crack in them is in its last stages of healing, so she is careful as she swings her legs down out of the bed. Her pants hook around her knee as she moves and she sees the dark scar looped around her leg where the shackle had sat when she moves. 

Ingrid bites her lip and pushes off the edge of the bed, shifting into Annette’s previously occupied seat. Annette hops onto the bed, sitting so that she’s facing Ingrid. She reaches out to take Ingrid’s hands and Ingrid finds herself quickly swept up into the chaos and optimism that is Annette Dominic as her friend starts recounting the last few months. 

Ingrid’s heart sinks when Dedue is brought up but it then skips a beat when Mercedes gently touches her shoulder, startling her. She glances back, but Mercedes just gives her a calm smile as she holds up a brush. Ingrid nods and lets Annette recapture her attention as Mercedes slowly brushes out Ingrid’s hair.

Mercedes goes slow with the cuts, being careful not to pull on Ingrid’s hair at all as she evens out the jerky cut and takes a few extra inches off. Ingrid breathes slowly and shallowly as Mercedes works, most of Annette’s chatter drifting right over her head. After what feels like an eternity, Mercedes hums happily and Ingrid feels her move away. 

“All done!” she says cheerfully. 

Annette claps her hands together. “Oh! It looks so nice, Ingrid!” 

Ingrid blinks and tentatively lifts a hand. Through the heavy bandages on her hands, she can hardly feel her hair, but it feels lighter. It’s a different lightness than it had been when Cornelia had slashed it off back then and she’s not sure yet if it’s a good feeling. It’s freeing though, to take control back in some part of her life. 

“Here,” Mercedes says, leaning forward again, holding out a small mirror. 

Ingrid doesn’t take the mirror because she doesn’t trust herself not to drop it, but she turns her head to catch her reflection. Her face is thin and her eyes look tired, but Annette is right. The short hair does kind of suit her. Ingrid laughs faintly, feeling tears prick at her eyes. 

“Thank you,” she murmurs. “It looks great.”

* * *

It takes her a little while longer to gather the will to leave her room. She walks down the hall of the upper-level dormitory towards the opposite end of the hall. The dorms are in a strange state: some of the rooms are ransacked and destroyed. She notes that Edelgard and Hubert’s old dorms, in particular, have been torn through and their doors are broken down. 

The door to Dimitri’s room is wide open and his room appears to be untouched. It looks like someone had gone through and cleaned up the room, changing the linens, dusting the desk, but it doesn’t look like anyone has lived there, probably since the end of the war. Ingrid swallows the lump in her throat. She has heard about Dimitri, but she has not yet seen him and what he has become. 

Ingrid considers knocking on Felix’s door, but she decides against it, moving on to the last room in the hallway. The door is a few inches ajar, so she takes a deep breath and pushes it open. The room is empty, but in a contrast to Dimitri’s room, Sylvain’s room looks lived-in. His bed is made, but there’s a depression in the pillow that indicates someone has slept in the bed. His desk is tidy, but there are a handful of half-written letters and a half-empty oil lantern. 

She grazes her fingers atop the desk slowly, pressing her lips together. She had hoped that Sylvain would be here, but it makes much more sense that he would be in the infirmary, especially with what Mercedes has said about his injuries and the trouble that they’ve been having treating the injury. He is, apparently, still not awake and that knowledge makes her stomach turn with guilt. 

She doesn’t linger long in Sylvain’s room, moving on quickly, and descending the stairs down to the first floor and the ground level of the monastery. She stops in the doorway of the building, hesitating. She hadn’t thought much about it, but the fact that she is about to take a willing step outside for the first time in a few _months_ gives her pause. 

A cool breeze blows around her and Ingrid’s lips curl into a faint smile as she takes a small step forward. She is wearing a jacket that Mercedes had lent to her and her borrowed boots feel a tad too small, but she is outside. She tucks her hands into the pockets of the coat as she steps out, pausing in front of the greenhouse. 

The monastery looks different. She has heard of its destruction and their rebuilding efforts, but it’s different to see it first hand. Some of the glass panes on the greenhouse are smashed and the others look worn, but the greenery that she can glimpse inside of it is the most beautiful thing that she has ever seen. Blindly, she wanders inside. 

As soon as she steps foot inside, there’s a clattering noise. “Ingrid?”

She blinks and looks around. There’s another clanging sound and then Ashe springs up to his feet from where he had been kneeling in the soil. It takes her a half-second to realize that it is Ashe because he looks different. Like Annette, the youth in his expression has faded and he has grown an astounding amount. 

Ashe brushes his hands off and steps towards her. “I didn’t expect to see you here.” 

Ingrid shrugs. “This whole place looks different.”

Ashe’s expression softens a bit. “Yeah. It’s different.” He looks over at one of the growing plants in the greenhouse. “I’m not the best at this, but I’m doing what I can. We need the supplies.”

Ingrid shifts her weight. “Yes. With the Fraldarius supplies and soldiers coming soon, we’ll need everything that we can get.”

Ashe avoids her gaze for a moment and Ingrid wonders about the awkwardness between them. She and Ashe had had an easy, unlikely friendship at the Officer’s Academy and they had readily exchanged letters for about a year into the war until House Rowe had fallen into the Dukedom. 

“You’ve changed a lot, Ashe,” she says. 

He looks up at her sharply and she wonders if it was the wrong thing to say, but then a sheepish smile spreads across his face and her worries are eased. “Hopefully all in good ways,” he says. 

Ingrid smiles. “I mean, you’re taller than me now,” she points out and Ashe laughs lightly. 

“I guess so,” he agrees.

She crosses her arms. “It’s good to see you,” she says. 

His smile drops a bit. “It’s really good to have you back, Ingrid,” he says. His words carry a little extra weight to them and she looks down, biting her lip. 

“I have a lot of people to thank for that, I think.”

Ashe shrugs. “You know, we went every time with Sylvain to wait for him. We never wanted to send more than one person up there just in case they were watching you, but we were all there. We were all there when you guys came out too. And, from what I’ve heard, you did the rescuing all on your own.”

Ingrid brushes back a strand of her hair and forces a small smile. She feels a painful phantom tingle in her fingertips. “I still feel kind of stupid.”

Ashe shakes his head. “You’re not.” He pauses. “Maybe I don’t have the whole story, but from what I do know, it sounds like you did a lot for your people in making that sacrifice.”

Ingrid sighs. “Some knight I am though, getting locked away in a tower.”

Ashe is silent for a moment. “Maybe not in the traditional sense, but do you remember the story of Jules Rampteau?”

Ingrid vaguely knows the story. Jules Rampteau was a Faerghan knight famous for his dedication to the lands where he grew up. In tales about his life, Rampteau is often credited as a pacifist, who performed his knightly duties by being politically savvy and an excellent negotiator. He had, apparently, given up a noble title to serve as a knight, but his most famous action, was when he retired from knighthood to lead his home into the future, not as a noble but as a commoner. 

“What about him?”

“He served his knighthood through peace and his service to his home,” Ashe says. “What you did in Galatea embodied that. You protected your people and you held off open conflict there in doing what you did. I don’t think that’s less knightly or noble than anything any of us have done.”

Ingrid falls silent. She hadn’t thought about her imprisonment in that way before, but it does serve as a reminder for why she had originally surrendered herself to Cornelia. She had saved her family, her people, and even managed to prevent the Dukedom from getting their hands on her House’s Relic. 

Ashe’s reassurance has made her feel simultaneously better and worse. She feels less like she has failed her friends and her people, but it does make her feel guilty for running away from Galatea now, leaving it to the Dukedom. 

She shifts her weight and looks at Ashe again. “Thank you,” she says quietly. 

Ashe nods. “No problem, Ingrid.”

* * *

After her conversation with Ashe, Ingrid wanders to the Dining Hall to get something to eat. She has a brief conversation with Marianne and Ignatz but excuses herself after a short while to keep re-exploring the monastery. The place feels both foreign and familiar. Overall, it is the same as it was five years ago but the people are different, the atmosphere is different, and the sustained damage makes it look different. 

She follows her instinct to the northern part of the monastery, standing on the bridge that connects to the cathedral. She closes her eyes, flattens her hands along the railing, and takes a deep breath. The air is chilly, but it reminds her that she is breathing and she is _free_. 

There’s a scuffling noise behind her and Ingrid twists, caught off guard. She reaches for a weapon that isn’t there and presses her back to the railing. There isn’t an enemy behind her, but that doesn’t make what she sees any less unsettling. 

She has been told about Dimitri. Sylvain had told her about him and Annette and Mercedes have explained his situation to her, but the sight of Dimitri in his huge cloak with hunched shoulders, an eyepatch, and a seemingly-permanent scowl etched on his face is disorienting. Ingrid is not Felix; she had not seen him after Duscur, but faintly, she wonders if this is what Felix had been talking about when he had called the prince ‘Boar’. 

“Your Highness,” Ingrid breathes. 

Dimitri’s good eye narrows. “You,” he growls. “I told them they were wasting time. You’ve set my plans back further.”

He steps towards her, his posture aggressive, and Ingrid presses herself back against the railing, suddenly worried about her lack of a weapon. Dimitri looms over her and sneers. He places his hands on the railing on either side of her, snarling as he cages her in. 

“What’s the difference one soldier can make? As far as I’m concerned, you handed yourself over. We’ve wasted enough time not pursuing that woman to Enbarr. You should have been left to rot in that tower.”

Ingrid’s rebuttal dies in her throat. Whoever this figure is, looming above her, she is certain that this is not the Dimitri that she had known. He would never have spoken to her so disrespectfully and that didn’t even account for the aggression that she can read in his body language. 

“Boar,” a familiar voice cuts in, razor-sharp. There have been few times in her life that Ingrid has been more glad to hear Felix. 

Dimitri’s head snaps to the side and Ingrid takes the opportunity she’s given and ducks under his arm, sliding towards the voice of her friend. Felix’s eyes are hard and his right hand rests on his sword’s hilt as he stares down Dimitri. 

A low growl rips out of Dimitri’s throat but he turns and marches away towards the cathedral without another word. Ingrid lets out a breath that she hadn’t realized she was holding as she watches Dimitri stalk away. She jumps a bit when Felix touches her arm and he jerks his hand back quickly. 

“Sorry,” he mutters. 

She shakes her head. “No, it’s okay.” She sighs. “Thank you, Felix.”

“You didn’t know.”

“I did,” she argues. “Multiple people have told me what he is like and I still let him corner me.”

“No,” Felix continues, “you were told. That’s different from actually seeing what he’s like.”

Ingrid presses her lips together and nods slowly. “I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that.”

Felix nodded. “He’s fucked up, Ingrid. Just stay away from him.”

She bit the inside of her cheek. “All that stuff that we heard, those awful rumours, they were true, weren’t they? He really was on his own, killing all of those people for so long.”

“He was,” Felix confirms. “But, don’t pity him, Ingrid. You can’t.”

She frowns. “And what are we supposed to do now, Felix? Do we just follow him blindly into battle? He’s going to lead everyone to their deaths! Faerghus needs a saviour, not more death.”

“We’re not following him,” Felix replies. “We’re following Byleth.” Ingrid blinks and he continues, “Nobody here is under any pretense that Dimitri should be trusted or followed. We’re following the Professor’s lead.”

“And that’s why your father is sending troops, right? Because he’s following the professor?” 

Felix’s jaw sets. “You know he won’t give up on the Boar. He wants to see it for himself and we need the soldiers.”

He’s right. If they’re marching for Enbarr, it is going to take more than the meagre group that is currently mustered at the Garreg Mach to launch an assault of that scale. Ingrid folds her arms and studies Felix. 

“You should carry a weapon on you,” he says, cutting her off before she can say anything. “We can’t vet every person that marches through the monastery. Plus,” he trails off, looking after where Dimitri had disappeared. 

Ingrid sighs. “You’re the one who took my weapon,” she points out.

“The Professor has it,” Felix defends himself. “And you gave it to me right before you did what is quite possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen you do.”

“I didn’t have a choice,” Ingrid snaps, her temper bubbling. 

Felix is pulling her into a hug before she realizes what’s going on. She barely has time to pat him on the back before he’s pulling away, his expression as flat as ever. “I know,” he says simply. “It was stupid, but it was brave too.” He steps back. “The Professor has Lúin.”

With that, Felix retreats and Ingrid crosses her arms, watching him leave. Felix has never been particularly good at expressing his emotions, so his actions are not a surprise to her. Ingrid watches Felix all the way until he disappears into the monastery and then she looks over her shoulder at the cathedral. 

It feels like she’s walking on a razor-thin wire. She has missed two months of tense politics and interactions between the rest of the Blue Lions, so it’s like she’s being forced to play catch up with relationships and politics that have been festering for five years. 

The army will march for Ailell soon to meet Lord Rodrigue, but Ingrid will not be joining them. Byleth had asked, a few days prior, but Ingrid had decided to stay behind. She hasn’t even set foot in the Training Grounds yet so she knows that she’ll be out of touch if she tries to hold a lance during a real battle. 

_Besides_ , the selfish part of her needles, _Sylvain isn’t awake yet and you want to be there when he wakes_. She owes him that much.

* * *

The day after her confrontation with Dimitri and her conversation with Felix, Ingrid reclaims her Relic from the professor and works up the strength to visit the Training Grounds. Felix is there, and he doesn’t seem entirely too surprised to see her. He swaps her Relic for a training lance and lines himself up to spar with her. 

Ingrid loses, as predicted, but it takes Felix more effort than either of them had been expecting for it to happen. She’s apparently not as out of practice as she should be. It comes back to her quickly and it’s mostly still faded-strength and a small loss of speed that end up betraying her when she and Felix square off. He knocks the lance from her hands and then the point of his sword hovers in front of her sternum. 

Breathing heavily, Felix drops his sword arm down and picks up her lance. He holds it out to her. Ingrid takes it, rolling it between her palms as she catches her breath. 

“You’re still sharp,” he says shortly. 

Ingrid nods. “I have been training for years. It’s not something that goes away so quickly.”

Felix considers her words. “I guess not.” He hesitates and then he looks away from her, but Ingrid can see the tension coiling in his body. “Sylvain is still out,” he mutters. “We’re going to have to retrain him to hold a sword at this point.”

Ingrid frowns, but the irritation that flares up in her is not with Felix, it’s with the situation. Sylvain is still unconscious and as frustrating as it is, the only thing she can do is put her faith in Linhardt and Lysithea who are working tirelessly to try and get him out of whatever weird stasis that Cornelia’s magic had sunk him into. 

“Let’s go again,” she says to Felix, raising her lance. 

He turns back to her, expression flat, but he doesn’t question her. He lifts his sword and Ingrid doesn’t get a warning before he’s flying at her. She sidesteps, deflecting his first blow with the shaft of her lance and then she backs up, extending her arms in a neat jab to reinforce the distance between the two of them. Against a sword-wielder, her greatest strength as a lancer is distance. She prods Felix back with the point of her lance and he catches it on the flat of his blade. 

He forces the tip up and slides forward, ducking under her guard and Ingrid barely has a second to adjust her grip and juts the shaft of her lance out to block his advance. Felix doesn’t expect the maneuver and she catches the twitch in his eyebrow which tells her that he is annoyed. She drops one hand from the lance and bats it against Felix’s sword arm. She steps back again, reintroducing the space, and the point of her lance finds the hollow of his throat. 

They both stand still for a moment, breathing heavily, and then Felix reaches up to push her lance aside. He steps back, resetting in the middle of the Training Grounds and he beckons to her to follow him. 

“Again,” he says. 

After eight bouts, of which she wins two, Ingrid wonders how much of this training is for Felix and how much is just his way of worrying about her. She shakes her head when he tries to get her to go for a ninth round and lowers her weapon. 

“I’m done,” she says. He looks like he is going to argue with her and Ingrid scowls. “Felix,” she snaps, “I’m done.” She stalks away from him and places her lance into the weapon’s rack. She turns back to him. “I know my limit,” she reminds him. “I can take care of myself, you don’t have to beat it into me. I’m not Sylvain.”

Felix’s eyes are sharp as he studies her. “I’m sorry,” he says gruffly. “I know.”

She crosses her arms. “I didn’t lose a fight in Galatea. I gave myself up.”

“I know,” Felix says again. 

She frowns. “I’m not going with you to Ailell,” she says. 

He doesn’t look surprised. “Have you been to see him?”

Ingrid tenses. “No,” she admits. 

“Tch,” he grunts and finally turns away. “You should.”

It strikes her then, that Felix is angry. He has been worried about her, undoubtedly, but he is also angry with her. Ingrid opens her mouth to say something, but he has already started walking away, so she clams up, staring after him, something uncomfortable twisting in her stomach. 

She wants to be angry with him, but it’s hard. It’s hard when she has spent the last two and a half months with very limited contact with other humans. Sylvain had been her most consistent companion and she knows where that landed him. She had missed Felix, worried about him, but she hasn’t found a way to tell that to him. It still feels like she’s treading on glass around him. 

While her lancework has apparently stuck with her, her social aptitude has weathered like the stones of the old tower she has been trapped in. 

* * *

She doesn’t see Felix again that day, nor the next, but she does spend some more time with Annette. They have tea under the gazebo outside and everything is going completely fine right up until Annette uses a small, highly controlled fire spell to warm her tea. Ingrid doesn’t realize she has stopped breathing until her eyes water and her chest hurts and her vision tunnels. She shoots to her feet so quickly that her chair topples over behind her.

Annette stiffens, immediately extinguishing the flame and lowering her hands. “Ingrid?”

Ingrid grips her left wrist with her opposite hand and squeezes until her nails dig into her skin and she lets out a jilted, half-broken wheeze. It still feels like she can’t breathe and her ankle starts to burn where the shackle had branded her. She shakes her head and backs up unsteadily, bumping into the frame of the gazebo. 

Annette looks a cross between horrified and concerned as she stands up slowly. “Ingrid?” she asks again, her voice soft. 

Ingrid is finally able to breathe out and she bites into the inside of her cheek. Her chest hurts and her mouth is dry, but the phantom pain around her ankle fades as she comes back to herself in the moment. Her next breath is shaky and it whistles through her teeth as she forces it back out just as quickly as it comes in. 

“I’m fine,” she says hurriedly even though her eyes are still burning and her head is spinning. “I’m fine,” she lies, turning her head so that Annette can’t see the terror on her face. “I’m sorry.”

She wraps her arms around herself and takes another few shaky breaths. She bends down and rights the chair, tucking it under the table. She avoids Annette’s concerned gaze 

“Ingrid,” Annette says again and it doesn’t sound like a question anymore. “It’s okay.”

Ingrid swallows slowly and shakes her head. “Everyone keeps telling me that,” she mumbles. “I don’t want it to be okay.”

Quickly, evasively, and abruptly, she spins and hurries away, heading straight for her room. She hears Annette call after her, but she ignores her friend. Ingrid takes the steps two at a time back up to the second floor of the dormitories and she closes her door as soon as she sets foot inside her room. 

Ingrid clamps her hand down over her mouth and presses her back against the door, sinking down until her butt hits the ground. Her shoulders tremble as she fights off the urge to cry. She tries to take deep breaths, but her stomach turns uncomfortably. Her vision blurs again and she holds her breath, counting to five in her head. 

Once she reaches five, she forces herself to exhale, pushing a hand against her stomach as she pushes the uncooperative air out of her lungs. It takes her a few cycles of deep, awkward breaths for her vision to clear and even after she no longer feels dizzy, she can feel tears burning in the corners of her eyes as she tries to calm herself down. 

She feels stupid. It had been a tiny spell: nothing more than a flame at the tip of Annette’s finger, but it had sent her spiralling so quickly and unexpectedly that she didn’t know what else to do but flee. Cornelia’s magic is concentrated in dark magic and Annette’s Black Magic shouldn’t invoke the same reaction in her, but it had and there is no way for Ingrid to renege on that. 

Ingrid sits silently, focused on her breathing, for entirely too long. Her ears are ringing and she rests her chin on the tops of her knees as she stares, unfocused, at the floor. Outside of her room, she hears faint murmuring, but apparently whoever stops by to check on her decides against bothering her. 

She ends up sitting there through dinner and through the sunset and she only gets up because her window is open and the breeze drifting through it is cold. Her knees crack unpleasantly as she stands up slowly and her whole body feels exhausted and lethargic. She had felt like this after a particularly cold or quiet day up in the tower. She has a sudden desire to be around people, but it’s the fear of someone asking questions about the incident from earlier that makes her uneasy. 

She tries to sleep instead, staring blankly at the ceiling. 

* * *

In the end, she does end up leaving her room and she wanders through the monastery, sticking to less-travelled paths until she reaches the stairs to the second floor. Her blood pounds in her ears the whole way as she walks down the hall, making her way to the Infirmary. It’s quiet up here, and as it seems to get quieter the closer she gets. 

The door to the room is ajar and she almost walks away, losing her nerve, but she’s caught before she can. Linhardt is sitting in a chair in her line of sight, studying something on a piece of parchment, but he looks up, noticing her. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t hardly acknowledge her beyond a slow blink of recognition, but Ingrid feels too awkward to leave now. 

She pushes the door a little further open and it creaks slightly on its hinges. The infirmary is rather barren and empty. Aside from Linhardt, who has gone back to his reading, Lysithea is slumped against a desk, passed out, and Sylvain’s prone form lies atop one of the cots in the room. 

Ingrid’s vision tunnels to him and she feels her hands start to tremble as she watches the slow rise and fall of his chest from across the room. 

“He’s fine,” Linhardt says, his voice low and quiet. “He’s not in any serious danger from what we can tell. He’s not even all that injured anymore.”

“But he’s not awake,” Ingrid murmurs. She takes a hesitant step towards Sylvain and then her body is moving towards him like she’s being reeled in. Sylvain’s expression isn’t what she would call peaceful, but it’s flat and neutral and doesn’t seem to betray any pain. 

“No,” Linhardt agrees. “Whatever that spell was, it took him out of it. He’s in some kind of magically induced stasis and we haven’t been able to wake him at all.”

Ingrid, without thinking, touches Sylvain’s hand. She runs the pad of her index finger across his wrist and down the back of his hand before she slides it under, tracing a faint circle on his palm. He doesn’t stir. She presses her lips together and takes a deep breath. 

“How are you faring?” she asks. 

Linhardt looks at the sleeping Lysithea. “We’re trying our best. She thinks she’s getting close. But we need more time.”

Ingrid nods slowly. Her thumb grazes the length of Sylvain’s thumb. His skin is cool to the touch. “Please,” she whispers, “save him.”

* * *

Ingrid doesn’t talk to Felix before the army heads out for Ailell. She does talk to Annette and Annette doesn’t ask her to explain or qualify her reaction in any way, just giving her a tight, familiar hug, and Ingrid’s throat tightens. Mercedes hugs her too, promising to bring everyone back safely and then the army is leaving and Ingrid is left behind. She stands in the gates of the marketplace as the cavalry units ride out and lets her eyes trace the wyvern and pegasus battalions in the sky. 

For the first time since she had returned to the monastery, she feels a familiar itch in her skin to take flight. 

Ingrid has always liked heights. As a kid, pegasi had interested her to no end with their beautiful wings and the alluring image of Pegasus Knights. When she had first flown on a pegasus, it had changed everything. She had known, then, that that was the only way she would ever want to fight. She loves the wind in her face and the exhilaration that flying grants and she has never been afraid of falling. 

Even so, there had been days, locked alone in the tower, that she had wondered about jumping–wondered if it would be worth it. In the end, she had never let herself entertain those thoughts for long, but it had given her a new perspective on heights. For the first time, she had felt afraid of them. 

Once the last pegasus is out of sight in the sky, Ingrid heads for the Training Grounds. Since the entire fighting force of the army is now en route towards Ailell, the grounds are deserted. Ingrid takes her time setting up three training dummies and she picks up an iron lance, not worried about hurting her sparring partner. 

The weight of the metal weapon is more familiar than the lightness of a training lance. She starts a few warm-up drills and then stops to stretch her arms and her legs, working out the lingering stiffness from hers and Felix’s heavy training session. She moves into a few more complicated drills and then, soon enough, the sun is higher in the sky and it’s almost afternoon. 

She is just putting her equipment away when the doors to the grounds slam open and Ingrid sees an out-of-breath Lysithea burst through. Ingrid tenses, prepared for bad news, but there’s a wild glint in the mage’s eyes that makes her falter. 

“He’s awake,” Lysithea says and Ingrid is sprinting past her, heading for the Infirmary before the words are even fully out of her mouth. 

* * *

By awake, Lysithea had meant groggy, out of it, and only half coherent. Linhardt had been checking him over when Ingrid had burst into the infirmary, probably looking like she had just run all the way from Galatea, but she forgets it all when she sees Sylvain sitting up, his red hair a wild, tangled mess, and his golden-brown eyes flitting around the room until they land on her. 

Her heart flips and the little needle of worry– _guilt_ , she corrects–pulls free of her chest and it feels like she can breathe again. 

“Sylvain,” she says. 

His eyes brighten and it’s like whatever scattered focus he has zeroes in on her as his lips pull into a faint, almost disbelieving smile. “Ingrid.”

Linhardt coughs and the moment shatters. Ingrid turns her head away, almost holding her breath as she feels heat swell in her cheeks. She lingers awkwardly while Linhardt does a check of Sylvain’s injuries, especially his shoulder, and then the former Empire noble steps back, nodding to himself. 

“Take it easy,” he directs Sylvain and then looks at Ingrid: “Make sure he takes it easy.”

“I will,” she replies immediately. She can feel his eyes on her, but she steadfastly looks away until Linhardt leaves and the door to the infirmary shuts behind him. 

As soon as the bolt clicks, she turns to face him and it feels like her skin is crawling. Sylvain blinks at her slowly and a half-hysterical laugh wells up in her chest and she caves, crossing the room to his bedside. Sylvain surges up from the cot to meet her halfway and she buries herself in him. Her arms loop around his neck and her hands grasp at the back of his bandaged, unclothed shoulders. She presses her face into the crook of his neck and gasps an unsteady breath. 

He smells like medicinal supplies and the Infirmary, but his skin is warm and his palms sear into her as he tightly hugs her back, one hand on her back and the other at the base of her skull, just brushing the ends of her trimmed hair. 

“You’re alive,” she whispers, almost not daring to breathe the words. 

“You’re free,” he responds. His voice is rough from disuse and Ingrid’s eyes burn with tears. 

She shifts her weight, sitting on the edge of the bed as she leans into him further, swallowing heavily as she clings to him. He is real and alive and breathing and unhurt and there is no crippling fear of getting caught to hang over them this time. 

She has held it together as best as she could since her return to Garreg Mach, but the moment she holds Sylvain against herself, listening to the thrum of his heart, she breaks. 

She wilts against him as heavy sobs tear through her and he shifts, drawing her up until she’s fully on the bed, draped half across his lap as they cling to each other. He doesn’t let her pull back, keeping her tucked tightly against himself. She tries to quiet her sobs even though she knows he won’t care, but then she feels his shoulders tremble in return. 

Ingrid twists, one of her hands sliding up into his wild hair and rubbing at his scalp as she keeps him close. She feels silly holding onto him like this, but Sylvain is holding her just as tightly and he manages to pull her in every time she tries to move away. 

She has no idea how long they stay wrapped up in each other, desperately clinging, as hands drift across exposed skin and tangle in messy hair. Somewhere along the way, the tears stop and the touch becomes one of cautious exploration. Ingrid’s fingers trace the shape of his nose and his cheekbones and down into the hollow of his throat and Sylvain’s hand runs along the curve of her leg and over her hip until he rests his hand flat against her hipbone. 

They end up lying down on the too-small cot together, one of Ingrid’s legs tangled in his and his hand pushing up the loose fabric of her shirt across her back. The moment is painfully intimate and Ingrid is too afraid to say anything because then it will have to end. 

She holds her tongue and rests her forehead against his neck, stroking across the bandage that covers the stab wound he had received from Cornelia’s magic: the only injury he has left from their escape from the tower.

Sylvain breaks the silence first. “You’re safe,” he murmurs, his voice muffled as he angles his mouth to the top of her head. 

She closes her eyes and breathes in the scent of sterile bandages and medicinal salves: smells that remind her that he is okay. 

“We’re safe,” she breathes back. 

* * *

Ingrid splits her time between Sylvain and the Training Grounds for the next several days. Sylvain, as much as he claims to be completely fine, is confined to either the Infirmary or his quarters by Linhardt and Lysithea who insist that they need to monitor his wound to make sure that it is, firstly, no longer infected by the Dark Magic and, secondly, not going to have any adverse effects. 

When she’s with Sylvain, the room feels stifling and cramped. Sylvain notices, almost immediately, and he opens the window for a light breeze. He is cautious of the way that he touches her, making sure that she sees his intentions and can predict the contact before it happens. His hands stick to her arms and occasionally her knee or leg and he never squeezes her unless she initiates it first. 

Ingrid wants to be annoyed by the way that he is treating her like she is made of glass, but then she remembers that sudden contact from Annette or Mercedes had startled her and the way that she had panicked when Mercedes had touched her throat or when Annette had used her magic. The feeling of helplessness is invasive and irritating and Ingrid wants nothing more than for it to disappear. 

Linhardt, after four days, finally lets Sylvain walk around the monastery a little, provided that he does not do anything strenuous. Sylvain insists that Ingrid get her daily training in and promises that he’ll be fine to watch her. Ingrid is sure that it’ll be boring for him, but she doesn’t protest too much. 

Sylvain sits at the edge of the Training Grounds as she works through drills, spinning her lance with practiced ease. He doesn’t say anything to her, but she is hyperaware of the way that he watches her. It’s not a predatory look, simply one of curiosity. She doesn’t comment on it. 

Once she finishes her training, her limbs tight and aching, she puts her weapon away and turns to him. He gives her a plain, innocent smile and Ingrid feels torn. Six months ago, she would have simply nodded back to her friend and continued on her way, but after what had happened, her instinct is to be closer to Sylvain so that she can be warm and so that she can have human contact. 

Of course, in the monastery, it makes very little sense for her to only associate Sylvain with human contact when there can be dozens of people around when the place is at full capacity, but it’s an association she cannot rid her brain of. 

She’s standing, struck, in the centre of the training grounds, when the doors swing open and a soldier enters. He’s wearing scuffed armour that is familiar to Ingrid and she tenses, immediately making her way over to the man. Sylvain is right on her heels, also recognizing the soldier. 

“You!” Ingrid calls out, catching the man’s attention. “You wear the symbol of House Fraldarius. Do you bring news?”

The soldier looks a bit startled at the sight of both Ingrid and Sylvain, but he nods quickly. “The army has just returned to the monastery. I believe that His Grace and Professor Byleth will be in the Entrance Hall.”

Ingrid pauses, studying the man. “And Ailell? What of the operation?” 

The man shakes his head, his eyes dropping. “It went to blows,” he said. “Count Rowe turned up, backed by a contingent of Dukedom soldiers. We were victorious, but the Dukedom somehow got word of the rendez-vous and intercepted us.”

Ingrid’s heart sinks. It’s her fault. She and Sylvain had discussed Ailell in the tower and the importance of it for the Kingdom’s army. If there had been an ambush, it had been because Cornelia had heard them discussing it. She feels ill. 

“Thank you,” Sylvain says dismissively to the soldier. He lightly touches Ingrid’s arm and guides her towards the exit of the grounds. “Come on,” he urges. “We should go meet the others.”

Ingrid lets him lead the way. As they walk past the old classrooms, Sylvain glances at her. “Don’t blame yourself,” he says firmly. 

She stops in her tracks. “Sylvain, there is no way that Ailell becomes an ambush if it hadn’t been for me.”

He shakes his head. “Remember, Ingrid, I was the one who told you about it. If anyone is at fault for this, it is me, but the Dukedom would likely have caught word of Fraldarius soldiers marching south and intercepted anyway.”

She presses her lips together. “It will be my fault if anyone was hurt,” she says simply and continues walking, leading the way to the Entrance Hall. 

Sylvain follows her, but he does not try to further the discussion. Instead, they find themselves nearly running into Dimitri as he marches through the courtyard between the Entrance and Reception Halls. Dimitri’s step staggers as he sees Sylvain and Ingrid wonders if the sane part of the prince is surprised to see his friend.

There is a moment’s pause where the three of them stand in silence, but then Dimitri’s good eye narrows and he continues marching away, seemingly headed to the cathedral. 

Sylvain’s jaw sets, but Ingrid does not have a chance to comment before she hears a familiar cry. 

“Sylvain!” 

They turn and see Annette and Ashe hurrying out of the Entrance Hall towards them. Annette immediately throws her arms around Sylvain, hugging him tightly, and Ashe’s eyes gleam. 

“You’re alright!” Ashe exclaims. 

Sylvain chuckles and pats Annette’s back. “Yes, Lysithea and Linhardt figured everything out a few days ago.”

Annette releases Sylvain from her tight grip and beams at him. “It’s so good to see you’re okay!” 

Ingrid glances past them towards the Entrance Hall. “How are the others? How was the battle?”

Ashe’s expression falls a little. “House Rowe intercepted us. We were victorious, but we lost some men. Felix and Lord Rodrigue and the professor were all just behind us.”

Sylvain pats Ashe’s shoulder. “Right. I should go let the rest of the group know that I’m back on my feet.” He glances at Ingrid. “I’m sure Rodrigue will want to know you are alright too.”

Ingrid nods curtly. Lord Rodrigue has been in contact with her father most recently since her family had fled to Fraldarius. Perhaps he would also know what had become of Galatea since Ingrid’s untimely departure. 

Annette and Ashe let them carry on into the Entrance Hall and when they reach the top of the stairs, Felix spots them. His tense expression deepens, but he abruptly aborts his conversation with his father to stalk towards them. That seems to be enough to draw Rodrigue and Byleth’s attentions as the two follow after Felix.

Felix stares at Sylvain. “You’re awake.”

“With no adverse effects or lingering injuries,” Sylvain confirms, a smile curling in the corner of his mouth. 

“Sylvain! Ingrid!” Rodrigue calls as he approaches them. He looks immensely relieved. “When I heard what had happened, I could hardly believe it. It’s good to see that you’re both alright now.”

“Lord Rodrigue,” Ingrid says worriedly, “how is my family?”

Rodrigue’s smile is reassuring. “Do not worry, my girl. Your father and brothers are fine. They have been worried about you, but they’ll be making their way back to Galatea soon.”

Ingrid frowns. “What?”

“We marched back through Galatea,” Byleth explains. “That’s why we’re a day late.” The professor brushes aside a piece of her hair and Ingrid’s eyes unwillingly catch on a fading wound on her professor’s elbow. “The Dukedom has abandoned Galatea.”

Ingrid freezes. “What? Why?”

“According to the people, as soon as the Dukedom’s defeat at Ailell became evident, the Dukedom withdrew. Galatea is not a position that they can afford to hold with the Kingdom’s remaining Houses en route to the Garreg Mach,” Rodrigue explains. He does not say anything about Ingrid and the fact that Cornelia had lost one of the main reasons that she had claimed Galatea in the first place when Ingrid had escaped. 

Ingrid feels dizzy and overwhelmed with the knowledge that her people are free. Cornelia and her soldiers have left her home and there will be no one to stop her family from returning to their lands when this is all over. 

Sylvain’s hand touches her elbow. “That’s good to hear. I’m sure we have much more to discuss, but perhaps that is best saved for somewhere more comfortable.”

Felix shoots a hard glare at his father before he looks at Sylvain. “I’m not sticking around for this,” he mutters. “I’ll see you at the Training Grounds tomorrow.” He directs the last phrase to both Ingrid and Sylvain and Ingrid takes a slow breath, still overwhelmed. 

Felix stalks away and they all watch him leave for a moment before Byleth clears her throat. 

“Let’s move elsewhere,” she says, taking Sylvain’s suggestion. “We have a lot of work ahead of us.”

* * *

Ingrid keeps training. She starts doing her flying drills again and she remembers why she loves to fly. Her lancework is getting more polished and she thinks that she might even be ready to help in the next mission as the army pushes forward to the Great Bridge of Myrddin. She is feeling optimistic about it until she walks into the Blue Lions Classroom one afternoon and finds Flayn and Annette working on a series of Black Magic spells. 

Ingrid’s muscles tense as soon as she sees the magic and she retreats before either of the women catch sight of her. The sight of magic is still alarming to her and she can’t afford to be afraid. As a Pegasus Knight, she has trained in resistance to help her against mages and she has the maneuverability in the sky to get to enemy mage battalions and clear them out so that the rest of the army, like Armoured Knights, can move forward. A weakness to magic is not something that she can afford to have. 

Without thinking, Ingrid finds herself heading for the Cardinal’s Room. She pauses in the doorway, peeking inside the room, and is relieved to see that it is only occupied by Byleth, the person that she had been looking for. 

Ingrid knocks lightly on the inside of the doorframe and Byleth looks up from the battle map on the table in front of her. 

“Ingrid,” she starts, sounding a bit surprised. “How can I help you?”

Ingrid takes a deep breath. “I was hoping that we could spar.”

Byleth blinks. “Sure. I have a few more things to work out, but I’d be happy to work with you. Did you want to work on lancework or swordsmanship?”

Ingrid shakes her head. “I was hoping that you might help me with something else.”

Byleth’s posture shifts. “I take it you would like me to use magic?”

Ingrid adjusts her weight, feeling a bit awkward. “Yes. I need to get used to facing it.”

“You know that no one is expecting you to move past what happened so easily, right? There are other ways to fight. If anything, you’re still a better soldier than half of the fighters here.”

“It’s not about moving past something. It’s about getting back to a point where I can be–” Ingrid pauses, the words eluding her. 

“Reliable?” Byleth offers. “Individual?” 

Ingrid nods. “Yes. I want to take care of myself without needing someone to back me up.”

Byleth nods. “I understand.” She steps away from the table towards Ingrid. “I have a suggestion. What if I start by using White Magic?”

Ingrid blinks. “White Magic?”

Byleth’s smile is gentle. “It’s the furthest type of magic from Dark Magic, and the least damaging.”

“Okay,” Ingrid agrees. 

“If you’re okay with now, we can go now,” Byleth offers. 

Ingrid steps back, towards the entrance of the room. “Sounds good.”

* * *

Byleth takes her place across the pit from Ingrid. Ingrid adjusts her grip on her lance and spreads her feet, taking a defensive stance but making sure to keep her weight on her toes as she waits for her former professor to make the first move. 

Byleth lifts her hands, drawing her palms lengthwise across each other as her hands light up with white light, small runes glowing in the air around her. Ingrid recognizes the spell as Nosferatu, a simple White Magic spell that does damage and provides a little bit of healing to the caster. 

“I’ll start with Nosferatu,” Byleth says. “Focus on dodging and counterattacking. You can take a few hits from it–your resistance is good enough–but your agility will be your true boon once you start facing more powerful attacks. If you can avoid the brunt of a spell, you’ll dodge the most damaging area.”

This explanation is familiar to Ingrid from her initial Pegasus Knight certification examination, but the refresher is appreciated and it is still sound advice. Ingrid nods and taps the butt of her lance against the ground. 

“I’m ready,” Ingrid says. 

Byleth nods and claps her hands together before extending one outwards towards her. Ingrid charges forward reflexively, twisting to the right as the stream of white magic streaks past her. She lifts the head of her lance and swings down towards Byleth. A small smile curls up on Byleth’s face as she steps back, lifting her other hand to catch and deflect the point of Ingrid’s weapon with a shield of light. 

Byleth keeps moving, pushing another onslaught of Nosferatu towards Ingrid, but something has ignited in Ingrid. She is not afraid or put-off by Byleth’s White Magic. She sinks back into the person that she was when the war originally broke out–when she was one of the strongest counterattackers against enemy mages. Her steps are light and even and her motions are calculated and smooth. 

She takes a hit when she can’t dodge and turns the momentum into a stronger strike that forces Byleth on the retreat. Ingrid doesn’t realize she’s smiling until Byleth drops her hands, reaching for a Training Sword to block an attack when her magic reserves are tapped. Ingrid steps back, lowering the point of her weapon as she drops out of the sparring session. 

Her chest is heaving, but she feels lighter. It’s as if someone has pulled a thread taught in her chest that has fixed all the loose, uneven stitches she has been feeling since returning to Garreg Mach. Across from her, Byleth is smiling too and Ingrid relaxes into a non-offensive stance.

“That was very good, Ingrid,” Byleth compliments. “You showed no hesitation and your agility really came through.”

Even in all of her spars against Felix, she has not felt this at home in her own body. It’s a comforting feeling and it does wonders for the shaky confidence she has been grappling with for the last several weeks. 

“Thank you for helping me.”

Byleth nods. “Of course. I’m happy to help in any way I can. Maybe tomorrow we can try White Magic again and then if it's still progressing well, we can move onto Black Magic?”

“Yes,” Ingrid agrees. “That seems agreeable.”

Byleth sheaths her Training Sword and her eyes drift past Ingrid towards the entrance to the Training Hall. “My next suggestion to you would be for you to continue to practice flying. You were always our ace up there.” Byleth strides forward, pausing when she is shoulder to shoulder with Ingrid. “But, for now, I’ll leave you two to talk.”

She brushes past and Ingrid turns, frowning after her, and then she sees who Byleth had seen. Felix stands just inside the entrance of the Training Grounds with his arms crossed. Ingrid doesn’t move towards him as Byleth slips out of the Training Grounds, leaving the two Faerghus nobles alone. 

Felix’s weight shifts subtly and he slowly steps forward. “You were sparring against her magic?” he asks. 

Ingrid nods slowly. “Yes. I need practice against it.”

Felix’s lips press together. “Right.”

Ingrid walks over to the weapons rack and places her lance in a slat. She turns back to her friend and takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Felix,” she says. 

His head snaps up and he narrows his eyes. “What? What are you sorry for?”

“I gave myself over. I put all of this pressure on your House to look after my family. I put Sylvain in danger. I put everyone in danger by revealing the truth about Ailell.”

“Shut up,” Felix grunts. 

Ingrid blinks. “What?”

“We don’t need to have another version of this conversation, Ingrid. I’m not angry with you,” he replies simply. “I’m angry with the situation. I’m annoyed that this wasn’t taken care of before it started and that we have to be standing here having this conversation.”

Ingrid realizes, then, that while she had initially read his anger as frustration towards her, that isn’t true. Felix is bitter about a lot of things in his life, but it is his failure to protect that has him on the defensive here. 

“My father places so much stock in being the Shield of Faerghus,” Felix continues. “If we can’t even protect our neighbours, then how are we to protect a king who would love nothing more than to be run into the ground by his own weapon like the animal he is?”

Ingrid is moving towards Felix before she can stop herself. She pulls her arms around him and hugs him, resting her head against his shoulder. “You came to get me,” she says quietly. “You tried to come to get me sooner and you came with Sylvain as close as you could risk. It was your House’s spies that even allowed any of those meetings to occur.” She leans back a little, making eye contact with him. “Maybe we can’t change Dimitri’s mind about Fhirdiad, but we can fight alongside him every step of the way until he comes back to us. Maybe that’s all we can do and we will just hope that it is enough.”

Felix’s lips tighten. “It won’t be.” He takes a slow breath and something unreadable flickers across his face. “But you certainly won’t be flying or fighting alone.” He gently pulls out of her hug and steps away. “Come on. I was looking for you for a reason.”

Ingrid presses her lips together, but she doesn’t push the subject. Felix is defensive about a lot of things, but he has grown to not push it past the point where it becomes destructive. She follows as he leads the way out of the Training Grounds. She follows him down through the monastery until they enter the dormitories and climb the stairs to the second floor. 

Felix stops outside her door and waits for her to open it. Ingrid gives him a weird look, but she pushes the door open, stepping into her room. Her breath catches. 

“My father told me he put it here,” Felix mutters, folding his arms. 

Ingrid stares in shock at the armour in front of her. It has been repaired and polished and some of the pieces are newer than others, implying that they had to be replaced, but it is, without a doubt, the same armour she had donned the day that she had faced Cornelia. The same armour that she had considered lost the moment she had removed it. She quickly turns and stares at Felix. 

“What is this?”

“We found it in Galatea. It had to be patched and repaired, but it’s yours, Ingrid,” he answers plainly. “I know you didn’t come to Ailell, but we’ll be better for it if you come to Myrddin.”

The corner of her mouth pulls up and she takes a deep breath, nodding. “I’ll need to do some flying drills, but I’ll be there.”

Felix nods and crosses his arms. “I’ll spar with you if you need. And if you want to face really weak Black Magic, I can probably do that as well.”

Ingrid raises an eyebrow. “You stuck with that?”

Felix shrugs, his arms still crossed. “I had a good teacher.”

He could be talking about Byleth or Annette, who Byleth had asked to help Felix develop his Black Magic skills. Either way, she doesn’t press him. She looks back at her armour where it is waiting. Already, she can feel the itch in her fingers that she had used to get when she had wanted to go flying. 

“Thank you, Felix,” she says quietly. “I appreciate it.”

* * *

Three days before the Kingdom army marches for the Great Bridge of Myrddin, Ingrid is in a tactical meeting with Seteth and the other aerial commanders. Seteth, for all his protectiveness of Flayn and stoic nature, is perfectly calm and respectful of Ingrid’s decisions regarding their battalions. He doesn’t correct her or undermine her authority, simply making slight changes or respectful recommendations. 

After their battalions are dismissed, they are left with just the two of them and Byleth, who is coordinating the overall battle plan for the army left in the Cardinal’s Room. Byleth scrawls down a few last notes and closes her notebook, nodding. 

“Alright, I’m satisfied. You should be able to advance up the right side if you take that ballista. I’ll talk to Ashe about it.”

“Thank you,” Seteth says. 

Byleth nods to both of them and begins to make her leave. Ingrid turns to follow her, but Seteth clears his throat and she pauses, looking back at the Archbishop’s former advisor. The way that he is looking at her makes her hesitate. She still thinks about the advice he had shared with her all that time ago often, so she lingers, waiting on the other side of the war table for him to say something. 

“Ingrid, I asked you once if you thought you would be ordinary or insignificant without your Crest,” he says slowly. “I wanted to ask you if you have changed your answer since we last had that conversation.”

Ingrid clasps her hands together. “No,” she admits. “I don’t think I have. But, I wonder if this whole thing would have turned out this way without it. Cornelia could not have even gone after my home.”

“Perhaps,” Seteth agrees. “But, as I said before, I am not one for flattery. I say this with no amount of lightness that you displayed unyielding strength in the face of all that you dealt with back in Galatea. A weaker mind would have buckled much less, but it was your strength of character and your faith that kept you strong.”

Ingrid holds her breath. She rarely hears Seteth so open with compliments and it’s a bit disorienting. 

“Since then, you have put in a remarkable effort to press on your recovery and you have grown as a person since then.”

“I–” she mumbles, blinking in surprise. 

Seteth chuckles. “Do you deny it?”

“No,” Ingrid assents. “I have changed, but I am stronger.” She considers that thought. “I suppose it would be silly of me to be grateful for that experience, wouldn’t it?”

“Not at all,” Seteth assures. “Rather, it speaks as a testament to your strength if you were. You said yourself that you are stronger now. There is no shame in valuing strength.” He chuckles lightly again. “I did not wish to delay you. I’m sure there are other things you would like to be doing this evening. But, Ingrid, I do hope you agree that your strength is admirable and that whatever path you choose for yourself, whether you embrace your Crest or you turn away from it, will be the right path. It will be right because you will have chosen it for yourself.”

She exhales slowly, his words spinning through her mind. Reflexively, she clasps a hand across her chest and gives him a short bow. “Thank you,” she says openly. “It is an honour to hear such words from you.”

Seteth’s eyes glimmer. “Remember, I am not one for flattery or falsehoods. I speak only of the truth. You are strong, Ingrid. And your experiences will shape you, but you will choose your own future.”

Seteth’s words feel almost prophetic and she finds herself wandering into the cathedral without further thought. As she slips past the heavy doors, the quietness of the large, half-destroyed building is almost unsettling. 

Ingrid has never been particularly devout or gifted in Faith and White Magic. Religion for her has always just been a part of her upbringing. For that reason, she finds herself staring across the cathedral at the figure who stands, alone, before the pile of rubble that used to be an altar. 

Her boots click over the stone floors as she approaches him. He does not turn to face her and Ingrid stops when she is about ten paces back from him. 

“Your Highness,” she calls out to him. 

Dimitri does not turn, but she hears a low grunt in acknowledgement of her presence. Ingrid is patient, staying still and quiet as she waits for Dimitri to respond to her. She has no idea if he actually will, much less what he might say, but she has to see for herself what he is like. Their only real interaction since her return had been one where she had been unprepared to deal with him. She is not unprepared this time. 

He seems to sense her resolve because, after a minute, his cloak rustles as he turns towards her. In the dim light of the evening, his good eye glows a bright blue as it narrows. His lip is curled as he sneers at her. 

_“What do you want?”_

She tilts her chin up, refusing to be intimidated by him. “Felix calls you a beast,” she says calmly. “Sylvain talks about you like you’re lost.”

He scoffs. “I am neither man nor beast. I exist to drag that woman screaming to the hell where she belongs.”

“Maybe,” Ingrid agrees carefully, “but you are also our king. And we’ll fight with you regardless of where you lead us.”

Dimitri’s sneer loosens and he stares at her plainly. “Then you are all fools.” 

“And you’ll fail without us,” Ingrid presses. 

He makes a rough, huffing noise and turns away from her. “A means to an end,” he says roughly. 

Ingrid waits. She senses there is something underneath this exterior that he is presenting to her and she has the time to wait for him to finish the thought. 

Dimitri breaks first. “I’ll have Cornelia’s head.” The threat is cold and unyielding. “She’ll regret her choices.”

“That’s Dimitri-speak for ‘I missed you and I’m glad you’re alright’,” Sylvain cuts in. 

Ingrid turns, looking over her shoulder as Sylvain strides into the Cathedral. He looks calm enough, but Ingrid picks up on the bitterness in his tone. She knows that Sylvain is not like Felix where he believes there is no hope for Dimitri, but she also knows he had been particularly furious with Dimitri’s attitude towards her captivity.

Dimitri doesn’t rise to Sylvain’s jab and Ingrid exhales slowly. She steps away from Dimitri, towards Sylvain, and then stops. 

“We’ll follow you,” she says quietly. “We made a promise.”

* * *

They quickly leave the Cathedral, leaving Dimitri behind. Ingrid holds onto Sylvain’s arm and pulls him alone as they walk. He glances back over their shoulders as they start across the bridge, but he doesn’t protest. Ingrid’s heart thuds heavily in her ears until they are halfway across the bridge.

Sylvain stops there, pulling back on her to pull her to a stop too. He turns his arm and slides it down her hand until he cups her hand within his own. Shy and a bit uncertain, she draws away from his touch. Sylvain doesn’t hold her back, letting her hand drop away and then he pulls his hand back to his side. 

“Are you alright?” he asks. 

“I’m fine,” she says firmly. “I went looking for him.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to,” she answers simply. “We leave for the Great Bridge of Myrddin in three days.”

He looks surprised for a moment. “You’re coming?”

Ingrid crosses her arms. “I am. I am as much a soldier of the Kingdom as anyone else,” she reminds. 

Sylvain shakes his head. “I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. I just want to make sure that you’ll be okay.” 

“I’ll be fine,” she says. “I’ve been training almost non-stop since I got back to the monastery. Felix and his father recovered my armour from Galatea and I’ve been flying every day for the last while.”

The edges of his lips curl into a faint smile and he reaches out, telegraphing his move obviously, as he places his hand on her shoulder. “I know. You’re more than capable, Ingrid. You’re more capable than me for sure, but I can’t help but worry.”

Her shoulder had tensed when he had touched her, purely out of reflex, but the warmth of his palm is unthreatening and gentle, so she forces herself to relax. She’s been putting on a brave face for everyone about her feelings, but with Sylvain, she doesn’t want to. She doesn’t have to. 

“I think I’m still afraid of Dark Magic,” she confesses quietly. “I’ve been working with Byleth and Annette and Mercedes pushing past that fear, but even if I can face a mage now, there’s this sick feeling in my stomach that just doesn’t go away.”

Sylvain inches closer to her. His hand slides across her shoulder to the top of her arm and he squeezes lightly. “No one expects it to,” he assures. “We’re mostly just glad to have you back with us.” She watches him swallow roughly. “I’m glad to have you back, Ingrid.”

She is closer to him than she had expected and she suddenly finds herself thinking of a farewell dripping in unsaid words and the faintest brush of his lips against hers before he was ducking away, spinning back to freedom. There’s a tugging sensation in her stomach that tells her to kiss him here because he is looking at her like he might do it if she doesn’t. 

She cares about Sylvain. This is not news to her. She cares about all of her friends, but since the mess began, he was the one who had come for her. Sure, the others had been nearby, but it had been Sylvain who had put himself in harm’s way for her time and time again. The brown of his eyes is darker in the evening light and he is looking at her like he is looking at every part of her, good and bad, and he looks at her like she is wanted. 

_I am glad to have you back_ _,_ he had said. He has shown her as much since he had woken up, but the needle of guilt still presses into her stomach that he had been hurt so seriously because of her. He had been beaten and suffered from Cornelia’s Dark Magic because of her. 

As much as her heart tells her to close the distance between them, Ingrid ignores the urge, slowly drawing out of her friend’s touch as she steps back. 

“I’m glad to be back, Sylvain,” she says instead, pushing down the fluttering feeling in her stomach. 

She is reassured by his words and the promise that she does not have to be perfect, but she is still uncertain about so many things. It’s not as though these feelings that bubble up in her stomach for Sylvain are new or only a result of having been trapped in a tower, but she is still unsure.

Seteth had told her that she is not less or more for her experience. Her Crest does not define her. The path that she chooses for herself will do that. And as desperately as she wants to choose Sylvain, she isn’t ready to say that to him quite yet. 

There is no disappointment in Sylvain’s eyes as she backs off, breaking whatever atmosphere had been strung up between them. He smiles at her instead, shifting to hang his hands behind his head. 

“Stay where I can see you?”

A small smile pulls up her lips and she rolls her eyes almost instinctively. “As long as I can.”

* * *

There is an air of solemnity over the army as they prepare to march on the bridge. Their base camp is just far enough away to ensure they’ll be safe until the battle begins. Before she mounts up on her pegasus, Ingrid looks around. The other Blue Lions are all getting ready and preparing their battalions, but Ingrid spots Felix walking over to her. 

She turns to him, securing her Relic across her back. “Felix?” 

“Be careful,” he grumbles. 

She nods. “Same to you.”

Felix glances over his shoulder towards where Sylvain is giving out instructions to his own battalion. “Keep an eye on him too.”

Ingrid studies Sylvain. Since he had recovered from his shoulder injury, he has appeared to be in top form and he has put in more than his share of training, but Ingrid assumes some of the training was for Felix’s peace of mind, not his own. 

Felix doesn’t give her more of a chance to reply before he spins and stalks away from her. Ingrid shakes her head. Felix had used to get like this before missions back when they had been at the Academy, so it makes sense that he’s more jittery before an actual battle. She doesn’t waste any more time, lifting her foot into her stirrup and then pushing up into the saddle on her pegasus. 

She lifts off the ground and flies up a bit before she detaches Lúin from her back and positions herself for offence. On the ground below her, the figures of Dimitri and the professor at the head of the army seem small as Dimitri leads the charge forward and Byleth yells out, directing the troops to follow him. 

Ingrid squeezes her knees around her mount and flies forward, towards her first real battle in the war. 

* * *

The Great Bridge of Myrddin is absolute madness. The ballista on the right side of the map causes the flying units more than a few troubles, and the ground troops are stalled by massive demonic beasts and then by the reinforcements from Acheron. For a moment, the battle seems deadlocked. 

And then Dedue is there, his armour glistening as he cuts down a soldier pressing towards Dimitri. From as high up as she is, Ingrid cannot read Dimitri’s expression as he notices his loyal retainer, but she does hear the victorious cry that the Duscur warriors let out as they leap into the fray. 

Ingrid lifts her lance and lets out a cry of her own before she focuses back in on the battle, launching herself at a nearby Empire wyvern battalion. The cries are rallying to the Kingdom troops and they push forward with new vigour. 

Ingrid slashes Lúin across the flank of an enemy wyvern and sends them spiralling out of the sky. She turns in mid-air, scanning her surroundings, and just barely catches sight of the enemy archer who is manning the ballista as he fires into a group of Kingdom flyers. Ingrid is already flying towards the ballista before she even hears who the bolt hits, but Sylvain’s yell sends ice flooding through her veins so quickly that she nearly loses her balance and topples from her own saddle. 

She risks a glance back and sees Sylvain struggling to his feet on the ground, hauling himself off of an injured wyvern. Mercedes is already at his side, her hands alight with White Magic. Neither of them notices that the enemy has already reloaded the ballista and is aiming it at them for a second strike. 

Ingrid is too far away. She’s too far away and the spear she carries for this exact purpose is lost, buried in the neck of an enemy mage from earlier in the battle. Adrenaline pumps through her veins as she adjusts her grip on Lúin and does exactly what she has been trained not to do with full-length lances. 

She screams as she throws it with all her might, still diving through the sky. Somehow, her aim is true and she catches the lightly-armoured soldier straight through the chest with the heavy Relic. The air around her is burning hot and she realizes belatedly, that she is glowing with both the special Combat Art of her weapon and the power of the Crest of Daphnel. 

She doesn’t have time to consider her actions or their results much longer as she swoops down, snagging Lúin and jerking it free of the soldier’s body. From across the bridge, Ingrid can feel Sylvain’s eyes bearing into her. She ignores him, adjusting her grip on her weapon as she leans forward, throwing herself back into the heart of the battle. 

* * *

When the adrenaline fades from her body after the battle, Ingrid is exhausted. No amount of training compares to the stresses of real combat and she had been woefully out of practice. She lands when the last Empire soldiers retreat and dismounts onto shaky feet. The Kingdom soldiers cheer loudly. 

Dedue is rushed by Ashe and Annette immediately, both of whom pull him into crushing hugs. Mercedes is there too, using her healing magic to ease any of the injuries that she can. Ingrid is about to make her way over to Dedue and the rest of her friends when a hand grabs her arm. 

There’s a tug, and Ingrid turns into it as Sylvain draws her into a sudden and fierce hug. Her arms are pressed between their chests and Sylvain lets out a shaky breath as he clutches her tightly. Ingrid squirms against him, freeing one arm to pat the back of his shoulder. 

When he lets her go, his eyes are gleaming with something that is both worry and not. That familiar tug in her chest draws her into him and she presses her palm flat against his chest. 

“I’m fine,” she assures. 

He leans down until their foreheads knock together. “Don’t do that again,” he mumbles.

“I won’t.”

Someone calls their names and Ingrid reluctantly pulls away from Sylvain. His fingers trail all the way down her arm as she pulls away and her skin tingles beneath her armour. She turns and finds Byleth pushing towards them. Byleth’s eyes flick over Sylvain as well, but she says nothing about how close the two nobles are standing. 

“Are you both alright?”

“Fine,” Sylvain answers shortly. “Is that really Dedue?”

“Best as we can tell it seems to be,” she answers readily. 

Ingrid shakes her head. “It’s a miracle.”

A small smile curls up on Byleth’s face. “Maybe,” she agrees. The professor takes another look at both Sylvain and Ingrid. “Come on, you should both probably get your injuries looked at and then we’ll need to do a last sweep of the area.”

* * *

The next day, it’s evening by the time that they arrive back at the monastery. Dedue busies himself immediately by following Dimitri about, connecting to him in a way that Ingrid has only ever seen Dedue succeed. It’s like something human comes out in Dimitri when it happens. It gives her hope. It gives all of them hope. 

Rodrigue and Byleth continue to waste no time, already discussing the planning of their next assault on Gronder Field, the place that will stand as a definitive battle in the war. Ingrid watches from the courtyard as they head for the Cardinal’s Room. 

Mercedes scolds Felix all the way back to the monastery for a particularly self-sacrificing move he had made back on the battlefield, something Ingrid would not have believed if she hadn’t seen it for herself, and Annette is finally the one that manages to convince him to spend at least a bit of time in the Infirmary. 

Ashe disappears to the greenhouse, saying that he wants to make it as workable as possible for when Dedue gets the chance to take a look at it. Sylvain vanishes too, though Ingrid forces herself not to take note of where he goes. She considers going to the Training Grounds, but her muscles are still aching from the previous day’s battle. 

She ends up in the stables, running a curry comb through the mane of Sylvain’s warhorse. He doesn’t ride as much as he used to, since he’s been flying on wyverns more recently, but Ingrid knows that he still takes good care of his horses. The healthy sheen of the mare’s coat and the way that it nuzzles her when she strokes his nose tells her enough about that. 

She doesn’t notice Lorenz’s arrival until he clears his throat. Ingrid lowers her hand and turns slowly to face him. She puts a hand on her hip. Lorenz looks awkward. She’s almost glad that he does. Considering he had originally stood against them at the Great Bridge, Ingrid hopes that he feels awkward. 

“I heard about Galatea,” Lorenz begins and Ingrid immediately frowns. 

“What about it?” she prompts, tilting her head. The icy tone of her voice makes it very clear to him that he is treading on thin ice. 

“You stayed there, didn’t you?”

She drops her hand from her hip and crosses her arms. “Why does it matter?”

“I don’t mean to offend, I was simply curious. Your House chose to resist the Faerghus Dukedom back when it was established years ago. Why did you surrender when you did?”

“Because I didn’t want innocent people to die.” She lifts her chin. “You would understand that, wouldn’t you? After all, you claim to have only sided with the Empire because it would protect your lands.”

Lorenz’s lips press into a line and she knows that she has caught him. “I’ll admit, our surrender to the Empire was a political move. They promised my father more power than he had in the current Alliance system. I never would have wished for it to come to blows.”

“We’re in the middle of a war, Lorenz,” she points out sharply. “You can’t sit everyone down at a table for tea and talk out every problem.”

“Certainly not with your prince as he is. As much as I dislike Claude, at least he’s not-”

“I’d be careful how you finish that sentence,” Sylvain cuts in, his voice cold. Ingrid spies him first, leaning against one of the stalls just a few metres away, head lowered and arms crossed. “You never know who could be listening.”

Lorenz’s jaw ticks, but he nods respectfully to Sylvain in greeting. He looks back at Ingrid and dips his head, acknowledging that he had been called out and beaten enough. “Naturally,” he agrees. 

Sylvain lifts his head and his eyes lock onto Ingrid. That spinning, charged heaviness in his gaze from earlier is back and her stomach twists. Lorenz, thankfully, seems to be able to understand where he is not wanted, an improvement from their time at the Academy, and he leaves without much more flourish, vanishing back into the monastery and leaving Sylvain and Ingrid alone. 

Ingrid breaks the charged eye contact between them and ushers Sylvain’s horse back into its stall, turning her back on Sylvain. Once she closes the latch on the gate, Sylvain has crept closer to her, close enough that she almost bumps into him when she turns around again. 

“Ingrid,” he starts. 

“If you’re going to tell me that I took a risk, I know what I did yesterday,” she cuts him off. 

The corner of his mouth quirks up. “I was actually going to tell you that I think you’re amazing.”

She blinks. Sure there has been this unspoken weight between them, especially since the moment on the bridge, but this had not been how she had expected this conversation to go. She had expected a lot more blundering on the part of Sylvain, who she knows to flounder in the face of real emotions. 

“Oh,” she replies, feeling a bit stupid.

He steps closer to her, blatantly encroaching on her personal space. “I think,” he continues, lifting a hand to her face, “that you are amazing, Ingrid.” He brushes back a strand of her short hair. “I’m not a smart man or a simple man, but I know this, Ingrid.”

Her heart skips a beat. He is close and she wants to kiss him. “Is that why you kissed me in Galatea?” she breathes. 

He chuckles. “Maybe? I think that was mostly out of desperation though.” His hand cups her face and his thumb grazes her cheek. “Frustration, desperation, all of it. I just wanted you to be safe. But, you know, in the end, you weren’t the one who needed saving. You did that on your own, Ingrid. For someone who claims to not entertain her Reason skills, that was a strong Blizzard spell.”

She closes her eyes. “What if it had failed?”

“I don’t know,” he says simply. “It didn’t.”

“I don’t feel strong, Sylvain,” she confesses. “I still feel like I’m slowed down, weighed down, by what happened.”

“Maybe,” he agrees, “but you’re stronger for it. Maybe it has made you reckless. Mercedes and I would both have been dead without you yesterday. I don’t know if that’s such a bad thing.”

She feels herself lean into the gentle warmth of his hand on her face. It is a human touch and an open, unguarded one that tells her more than a few things. Sylvain loves her, _probably_. She loves him, _probably_. She trusts him, _undoubtedly_. She’s not afraid of this anymore. 

“This fight,” she murmurs, opening her eyes. “Are we going to win it?”

Sylvain’s eyes are on her lips. “I don’t know.”

“But we’ll try.”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” she echoes. 

Ingrid raises her own hand and grabs the collar of his shirt, tugging on him until he bends down, sealing their mouths together. The kiss is slow and unhurried, a stark contrast to their first kiss in the tower all that time ago. 

“You’re worth protecting,” she mutters against him. 

Sylvain breaks the kiss first, leaning back and pressing a slow, lingering kiss to her forehead. “You’re not getting out of this so easily. We still have so much to catch up on.”

The war isn’t over, not by a long shot, but just like Dedue’s miraculous appearance and the feeling of the whipping, freezing wind in her hair when she had jumped from the tower, Sylvain gives her hope. 

She clings to it a little tighter. “I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cheers to an unintentional Ingrid thesis <3 happy holidays everyone.
> 
> As always, I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/nicolewrites37) if you want to yell or I'm always around in the Sylvgrid discord ;)


End file.
